Enhanced high-capacity liquid handling systems

With increased throughput, additional plate capacity and expanded capabilities, this enhanced systems is said to be one of the most flexible and cost efficient instruments available

PerkinElmer Life Sciences, a provider of drug discovery, life science research and genetic disease screening solutions, has announced the availability of three new, enhanced MiniTrak models with increased plate capacity, higher throughput and new software tools for assay development.

All new MiniTrak models feature PerkinElmer's Stack Doubler module, providing high capacity microplate and pipette tip storage in a compact footprint.

The Stack Doubler holds two removable Stacker cassettes, each with the capacity to hold up to 50 SBS standard microplates, 15 deepwell plates, 12 robotic compatible tip boxes or a combination of tips and plates providing longer periods of unattended operation for greater lab efficiency.

Enhanced MiniTrak models also feature PerkinElmer's unique 20-inch MultiPosition Dispense (MPD) module allowing for more reagent positions.

The MPD allows multiple liquid handling processes to be run simultaneously, dramatically increasing throughput.

When combined with an optional gripper, each system can perform more assays in shorter run times, such as plate reformatting without reshuffling, multiple reagent additions and batch processing.

A new serial dilution feature provides the ability to load a single row or column of tips onto a 96-or 384-channel dispense head and travel across a microplate in either direction to perform serial dilutions common in IC-50 curves and standard screening applications.

"The flexibility of the MiniTrak has made it the cornerstone of our assay development and compound follow-up operations," said Nick Callamaras, group leader, UHTS and automation at Novartis.

"The speed, accuracy and precision of the system has allowed us to miniaturise our IC50 determinations into 1536-well format and to perform 192 eight-point serial dilutions per plate in about five minutes." "The enhanced MiniTrak models provide the user with an extremely flexible instrument, allowing them to maximise the power of their runs," said Warren Bock, vice president of liquid handling.

"Not only is walk-away time increased, but system throughput is more efficient and more applications can be accommodated." In partnership with V and P Scientific, PerkinElmer has introduced a new pintool option for its MiniTrak and Evolution P3 systems.

The pintool is a deck accessory that delivers a very low, precise volume (2nl to 500 nl) and comes in 96-, 384- and 1536- pin formats.

This option enables increasingly popular submicrolitre applications, such as screening compound libraries, spotting agar, agarose, and membranes.

MiniTrak is the industry's only conveyor-based liquid handling system, offering high throughput parallel processing.

When integrated with a multimode plate reader, the MiniTrak becomes a complete assay workstation.

Suitable applications include Elisa assays, pre- and post-PCR assays, nucleic acid extraction and more.

With increased throughput, additional plate capacity and expanded capabilities, the new enhanced MiniTrak becomes one of the most flexible and cost efficient instruments available.

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