Selected issue: 3/2007

In-gel digestion is a major bottleneck for large scale proteome analyses and is therefore a prime candidate for automation. The Proteomics Group at the Max Planck Institute (MPI), Göttingen, in collaboration with Tecan, has developed an innovative automated solution based on Tecan liquid handling workstations.

The Texas-based company Family Tree DNA provides genealogy testing for people who are researching their family trees and is currently heavily involved with the Genographic Project1 mapping human migration patterns over time.

Under the seventh amendment to the EU cosmetics directive, the cosmetic industry is obliged to phase out most animal experiments for cosmetic ingredients by March 2009. Cosmital SA, a research division of Wella AG and part of Procter & Gamble, is using innovative artificial human skin models to develop and validate new methods with the goal of replacing animal testing, and relies on Tecan’s Infinite™ M200 microplate reader for many of its assays.

The Tecan Integration Group (TIG) is currently putting together Boehringer Ingelheim’s third fully automated TRAC™-based screening system to meet the growing throughput needs of the screening laboratories at its principal research site in Biberach, Germany.

UK Biobank is using 11 Freedom EVO® liquid handling workstations to process thousands of samples each day in preparation for a long-term initiative aimed at improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses, including cancer, heart diseases, diabetes, arthritis and forms of dementia.

The Blood Donor Center in Halle, Germany, is using the Freedom EVO® Clinical 150 with integrated Te-PoolSafe™ module for safe and reliable automated pooling of blood for subsequent PCR-based testing, ensuring that blood products are free of infection.

At the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, the Coriell Cell Repositories serve the needs of the entire scientific research community by maintaining the world’s largest collection of human cell lines. Scientists there are using a Freedom EVO® 150 liquid handling workstation to prepare DNA from these cells, to distribute to research scientists investigating human disorders worldwide.

Scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, USA, have recently completed the Allen Brain Atlas, a threedimensional map detailing the expression of over 21,000 genes throughout the mouse brain. This comprehensive, three-year study depended on five Tecan GenePaint™ systems for the automated in situ hybridization of gene probes in hundreds of thousands of brain sections, providing patterns of expression for every gene down to the cellular level. The atlas is freely available at www.brain-map.org.

Now available for nucleic acid testing / Tecan has recently completed its first installation of a Freedom EVO Clinical liquid handling workstation combined with the Te-PoolSafe™ option and the Pressure Monitored Pipetting (PMP) option, controlled by Freedom EVOware Sample Oriented software.

Tecan’s HydroFlex™, the compact 3-in-1 application platform for automated vacuum filtration, magnetic bead separation and microplate washing, provides increased productivity and reliable results by automating a range of 96-well format applications, including PCR clean-up and bead assays, ELISAs, cell assays and protein arrays.

An upgraded version of the software offers a number of user-friendly improvements in the management of protein crystallography trials.

Tecan has recently developed the QuadChamber for fully automated processing of four different microarrays simultaneously on one slide, using the HS Pro™ automated hybridization station.