Scienion and Greiner Bio-One presented their innovative product portfolios at the LabAutomation 2004, the world's leading conference and exhibition on emerging laboratory technology
From January 2004, Greiner Bio-One and Scienion have offered combined solutions for new formats of microarrays.
The new products enable customers to perform a wide range of cost-effective and time saving chip-based biological assays.
With the joint launch of HTAplatforms (high-throughput microarraying) Greiner Bio-One and Scienion set an important milestone for the use of microarray technologies in the diagnostic market.
The new development is designed to meet the needs in diagnostic labs and pharma screening (pharmacogenomics, toxicogenomics).
HTAplatforms are an alternative for expensive glass slides and therefore save material and personnel costs.
In addition the automation of diagnostic analyses can be performed with existing standard liquid handling robots.
The new platform is offered in two formats: plastic slides with 12 arrays and microplates with 96 wells.
Each array or well respectively resembles a single chip resulting in the parallel analysis of 12 or 96 individual arrays.
The new HTAPlate format is conform to the recommendations of the Society of Biomolecular Screening (SBS).
The low height of the rims facilitate both quick and cost effective printing of a wide range of biological analytes (DNA, proteins, antibodies) onto the wells and an efficient detection.
The HTA Plate with its removable washing unit allows a temporary volume increase of the wells for hybridisation and washing procedures.
Additionally the segmentation of the plate into four stripes with 24 wells ensures the precise adaptation to daily needed probe volumes in diagnostic laboratories.
One main advantage of the open HTA platforms is a higher flexibility and range of applications for customers when compared to closed systems of competitors.
For improved solutions addressing biological questions and features Scienion has brought in its biochip expertise into this product development.
Scienion has developed the biological protocols which are available to customers as reagents and biological controls which are co-marketed by Greiner Bio-One together with the new arrays.
According to individual requirements customers can use different buffer systems ( Scispot, Scihyb, Sciwash, Sciprocess) and controls (Scicontrol) to immobilise and analyse single or double stranded DNA, proteins or antibodies.
"Users benefit from the optimal adjustment of reagents and plates or slides.
"Customers can analyze all relevant molecule groups in a single system and even on a single carrier simultaneously", says Holger Eickhoff, CEO of Scienion.
In addition Scienion adopted the Sciflexarrayer, a flexible non contact dispensing system, for loading the new carriers.
The drop-on-demand piezo-electric dispenser transports samples with precisely defined volumes at defined locations onto the carrier.
The handling of lowest liquid volumes using the Sciflexarrayer will become reality for biological and medical labs, since the minimal transport volume is 65 picolitres.
The manufacturing of chips is accompanied by an intuitive software integrating a supplementary computer-aided microscope.
The software of the Sciflexarrayer has been optimised for the use of HTASlides and HTAPlates and allows the fast production of arrays in these two formats.
