By Severin Heynen
The industrialization of biology has become possible thanks to the automation of repetitive tasks such as liquid handling, providing several benefits. It allows customers to extend their window of operations, achieve greater assay consistency and refocus expertise away from repetitive processes. In addition, moving manual steps, such as pipetting into the control of robots also enables secure downsizing of formats, including sample and reagent volumes.
Quality and precision in low volume pipetting – again and again.
Scaling down brings savings
The drive to generate more data has also created a demand for secure downscaling of volumes. Optimizing assays and reducing the volume results in cost-savings in both reagent and sample use. This is especially true when trying to maximize the use of expensive commercial kits.
Low volume pipetting in liquid handling automation can certainly bring all the scale and cost benefits described above. This potential has been recognized and has resulted in low volume pipette tips being added to the consumable portfolios of many lab automation manufacturers. In addition, validated low volume tips are now reliably dispensing at the microliter or sub-microliter level.
In the next post in this series, we will look at some examples of the importance of handling small volumes and how this is reflected in the choice of low volume disposable pipette tips.
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About the author
Dr Severin Heynen
Dr. Severin Heynen joined Tecan in 2015 as a product manager responsible for the disposable tip consumables. In his PhD studies at the University of Zurich, he mainly used biochemical and molecular biology techniques to study the mechanisms of retinal degenerative diseases.