Screening
The robotic screening facilities at Department of Biotechnology, SINTEF includes facilities for robotic liquid handling and colony picking as well as other equipment necessary for high throughput screening such as high capacity centrifuges and incubators.
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Genetix QPixII is a robotic unit designed to enhance microbiological work. The unit is capable of transferring microorganisms or biological material from agar plates to microtiterplates or from microtiterplates to microtiterplates, agar plates or nylon filter membranes. The robot uses 96 or 384 well microtiterplates, and material from 8000-10000 colonies can be transferred to microtiterplates during a normal working day.
Our two liquid handling workstations (Tecan Genesis 200 RSP and Beckman Coulter Saigan Core System are equipped for washing, filling, shaking, filtration, solid phase extraction, incubation, cultivation (including fed-batch), ELISA, and spectrophotometric, luminometric or fluorometric reading of microtiterplates. Robotic arms moves consumables and microtiterplates between the units on the workstations and/or a storage unit (total capacity approx. 180 microtiterplates). Both workstations have fully automated incubators, and the Beckman system has a shaking incubator (total capacity 12 microtiterplates, 42 in static mode). The robots are equipped with pipetting tools for fast and accurate pipetting in microtiterplates (volume range 1 – 1000 μl), as well as for pipetting in tubes, trays and troughs, and can use disposable or fixed pipetting tips. |
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There are two main reasons for robotizing liquid handling. First and foremost the robot is highly efficient, and can easily perform 30.000 pipetting cycles (aspiration, dispensing and mixing) in 8 hours. The other reason for robotizing liquid handling is high accuracy and elimination of human error in large pipetting operations. The 96-channel pipetting introduces a pipetting error of less than 2% at 50 μl.
