The mosquito system was first introduced last year and was modified to allow for high-throughput use in May. It uses a continuous reel of micropipette heads that, because they are disposable, remove the risk of cross-contamination of samples and the need for washing with solvents.
The system can cope with 96-, 384 and 1536-well plates, and can deliver anything from just 50 nanolitres of liquid up to 1.2 microlitres. There is a growing trend towards the 384 and 1536 formats in high-throughput screening, because they use much lower quantities of reagents and are less expensive to run.
At the LabAutomation, the flexibility of the system was demonstrated by a poster showing that mosquito can deliver cells into both 384 and 1536 well plates without killing them.
Researchers at TTP Labtech's research facility in Melbourn, UK, used the mosquito deliver the cells and checked their viability using a laser scanning fluorescence microplate cytometer, which could detect cell proliferation. They also described an experiment in which the viability of the cells was tested after exposure to a number of chemicals, which demonstrated the utility of the approach for whole cell assays.
In the high-throughput version, each reel of the mosquito contains 35,000 micropipette tips, which are changed within the instrument. A single reel can deliver to more than 90 384-well plates before needing to be replaced, and has a plate handler that will allow it to process 200 plates without user intervention.
It can be used to transfer the contents of four 384 plate to a 1536, or 'clone' four daughter plates from one mother plate, according to the company.
A spokesman for TTP Labtech told DrugResearcher.com that the system is particularly useful for cell-based screening, but also has applications in protein crystallography and genotyping using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR).