What steps can be taken to avoid degradation of tandem dyes?

Tandem dyes are highly sensitive and degrade easily. Fortunately, most of the factors that accelerate the degradation of tandem dyes are avoidable.

These are some things you can do to avoid degradation of tandem dyes:

• Store tandem dyes in dark colored bottles to reduce exposure to direct light, which accelerates degradation by breaking the covalent bond between the two dyes in the tandem pair causing them to decouple. Tandem dyes should be protected from exposure to direct light during storage and also when being used in assays.   
• Always store tandem dyes at the temperature stated on the product datasheet. Never store tandem dyes at freezing temperatures. Freezing causes denaturation of the donor fluorochrome in the tandem dye, resulting in loss of fluorescence signal.
• Make a note of the shelf life of the tandem dye as mentioned on the product datasheet. Tandem dyes have a relatively short shelf life as compared to their corresponding individual dye components.