Infrastructure
Automated liquid handlers (ALHs) are one of the truly enabling technologies of modern life sciences, particularly in medical testing, biological research, and high high-throughput screening.
Power supplies provide steady, precisely controlled electrical energy to electronic equipment.
The latest equipment, instrument and system introductions to the laboratory market.
Although the principles of clean room design go back more than 150 years to the beginning of bacterial control in hospitals, the clean room itself is a relatively modern development.
Until the mid-1980s, purification of nucleic acids was traditionally performed by phenol-chloroform extraction and alcohol precipitation, which involved tedious manual tasks with toxic substances. This approach was soon replaced by the introduction of spin-column technology.
Popular 96- and 384-well microplate-based applications are often not ideally suited for manual pipetting methods. Although readily available in most laboratories, manual pipette use in these formats is neither efficient nor consistent.
Automation solutions offer a great alternative to laborintensive manual processes. Liquid handling automation eliminates human errors and process inconsistencies over extended periods of time, resulting in an increased robustness compared to manual processes.
Marc Ferrer, Ph.D., Team Leader at the Chemical Genomics Center, which is part of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health discusses the need for automation in various laboratory settings.
A good system for chemical management begins with a complete inventory of the laboratory's chemicals and a material safety data sheet (MSDS) collection for those materials.
