MUHWA Quartz Cuvettes — 10mm Pathlength, UV-VIS, 2/Pack
Fused quartz is the only material that gives you a clean baseline from 200nm out past 2500nm in a single cuvette. Plastic cuvettes go opaque below 300nm. Glass cuvettes absorb hard in the UV. If your workflow involves measuring DNA at 260nm, protein at 280nm, and bacterial OD at 600nm — all in the same session — quartz means one cuvette type for all three measurements.
The quartz is synthetic fused silica (JGS2 grade), which has lower trace metal content than natural quartz. Why that matters: metal ions in the quartz lattice create absorption bands in the UV. Cheap quartz cuvettes sometimes show a shoulder around 240-250nm from iron impurities — right where your protein backbone absorbs. These don't. The transmission curve is flat enough across the UV-VIS range that you can run a wavelength scan from 200-800nm and trust that the features you see belong to your sample, not your cuvette.
Two polished windows, two frosted sides
The cuvette has four clear sides, but only two opposing faces are optically polished — those are the windows the light beam passes through. The other two faces are frosted for handling. Hold the frosted sides when inserting or removing the cuvette from the spectrophotometer. Fingerprints on the polished windows scatter light and reduce transmission — if you see a sudden drop in your 260/280 ratio, clean the windows with a lens tissue and ethanol before troubleshooting your sample prep.
The PTFE lid
Snaps into the top of the cuvette and provides a vapor-tight seal. If you're running kinetic assays where evaporation would change your concentration over 20 minutes of readings, the lid prevents that. For temperature-controlled measurements (thermal denaturation, enzyme kinetics at 37°C), the lid minimizes condensation on the outer cuvette walls that would fog the light path. Don't force the lid — it seats with gentle pressure. Forcing it can crack the cuvette rim.
Specifications
| Material | JGS2 fused quartz (synthetic fused silica) |
| Pathlength | 10mm |
| Transmission range | 200–2500nm |
| Volume | 3.5mL (full), ~1.5mL minimum working volume |
| Windows | 2 polished, 2 frosted |
| Lid | PTFE, snap-fit |
| Pack size | 2 cuvettes with lids |
Cleaning and care
After each use, rinse with the solvent your sample was in (water, buffer, ethanol), then with distilled water. For stubborn protein films, soak in 0.1M HCl for 10 minutes — quartz tolerates acid well. Don't use abrasive cleaners or scrub pads — scratches on the optical windows are permanent and will scatter light. Dry with a lint-free lens tissue or let air-dry inverted. Store with the lids on to keep dust out of the interior.
Matching pairs
For dual-beam spectrophotometers that require matched cuvettes, the two cuvettes in each pack are selected from the same production batch and have closely matched transmission characteristics. If you're running a reference blank in one cuvette and sample in the other, use both from the same pack. If you need to verify matching, fill both with distilled water, zero on the reference, and scan the sample cuvette — the baseline should be flat within 0.002 absorbance units across the UV-VIS range.
