BioTX Automation has explained how laboratories are using pipette navigation systems with light- and sound-guided prompts to increase accuracy and reduce costs during manual pipetting.
Clinical and diagnostic laboratories face serious challenges when asked to reliably manually pipette samples from vials to microplates or from microplate to microplate.
To improve laboratory performance and reduce costs it is imperative for directors to be able to clearly know which person is pipetting, at which station, and at which period in the analysis, so they ensure accuracy, break the bottlenecks, eliminate waste, and allocate resources to produce error-free results.
Ideally, they should be able to view the person's performance, not as a series of disjointed activities and hit-or-miss campaigns but as a unified set of processes - a specialised kind of factory - that consistently and predictably 'manufactures' results.
'In any functional area of business, set processes help us to determine what materials should be used to create something, by whom, in what time and at what cost,' according to Tony Jaros, vice-president and research director at Sirius Decisions.
But the absence of some of these processes in the lab is costing clinical and diagnostic labs in terms of money, credibility and missed conviction and diagnostic opportunities.
Labs are using pipette navigation systems with sound and light guides to optimise and accelerate output.
Voice- and light-guided pipetting systems can never reach the 'well-oiled machine' status of totally automated systems, but by leveraging the right technologies and expertise they can come very close.
Even in fully automated labs, when the robot is down, manual pipetting will be required in order to keep up with demand.
This puts the operators in a position where they are not as familiar with the protocols as they would be if they were doing the manual pipetting on a daily basis, which can lead to errors.
Pipette navigation systems can be used in these situations as well to lower costs, increase accuracy and bring systemisation to a manual procedure.
Pipette navigation systems use light and audible cues to guide a laboratory technician through each step of a pipetting or sorting lab protocol.
Microplate wells are illuminated during pipetting to guide the operator to pipette the indicated volume into the correct well at all times during the protocol.
As pipetting steps are completed, a footswitch or sensor is used to timestamp the completed protocol step and then it will display the next pipetting step in the protocol.
Pipette navigation systems are designed for a variety of pipetting and sorting applications.
All systems reduce pipetting errors, speed pipetting, allow data transfer to and from lab instrumentation and allow full time-stamped documentation of protocols.
These systems are suitable for clinical, sequencing, PCR, microarray and HLA labs.
