Issues encountered

1. Flow cannot be established and/or maintained reproducibly using this peristaltic pump. This arguably invalidates experiments that focus on assessing cell growth as a function of flow rate.

2. Silicone tubes wear out after a short period of running peristaltic pump, exposing cells to debris that proved problematic.

3. Fluid levels fluctuate within the same experiment without changing any parameters.

4. Peristaltic pump just stops at a random time without any notifications about the cause.

All the issues mentioned above contribute to unreliability of the peristaltic pump and the experiments will have to be done under better reproducible conditions.