Tecan has teamed up with Corning Life Sciences on an automated solution for plate sealing, unsealing and resealing in low volume microplate assays.
One of the key bottlenecks in performing many types of assay is the ability to effectively use small volumes (i.e. in low ml or nl range) for various assay and molecular biology applications. While it is possible to dispense small liquid volumes, the ability to work with these volumes has been limited due to rapid evaporation, especially at the higher temperatures that are required for many types of assays.
The new system aims to overcome these obstacles by providing an automated microplate handling and sealing system. It combines Corning's Robolid, a microplate seal that incorporates a silicone capmat into a standard polystyrene plate lid, with Tecan's Te-Lidder, a new microplate lid-handling accessory for robotic workstations.
The system is able to seal, unseal and re-seal a variety of commonly used 96- and 384-well microplates, according to the companies.
Meanwhile, Tecan has also launched an AutoLoader to complement its Aquarius bench-top multi-channel pipetting solution. The AutoLoader provides, collects, sorts and stores various plate types for Aquarius and is fully compatible with the stacker systems on Tecan's detection and screening units. It has a capacity of 250 plates or 72 disposable tip racks.
"The AutoLoader significantly extends the utility of our compact liquid handling solution," said Nicolas Sandoz, product manager at Tecan. "Aquarius can now be fed automatically and the prepared plates can be easily passed onto the next device. This eliminates the main bottleneck present in previous liquid handling systems."