Liquid handling for high-throughput operations

Deerac Fluidics Product Announcement.

Deerac Fluidics has launched two liquid handling products for high throughput screening (HTS) applications.

The Equator HTS is a low-volume liquid handler, capable of aspirating and dispensing microliter and sub-microliter amounts of screening reagents.

It provides flexible options for reagent reservoirs, including stirred reservoirs for cell- and bead-based assays.

With a large aspiration volume of 8ml and extremely low dead volume, the Equator HTS is said to be ideal for dispensing expensive screening reagents.

In addition to primary screening applications, the flexibility of Equator HTS makes it useful in assay development as well as secondary screening and lead optimization.

For example, the wide dynamic range of the dispenser (50nl to 20ul) combined with the ability to create column-wise, row-wise, or well-wise gradients permits rapid assay optimization or concentration gradients of compounds for IC50 studies.

The Latitude is a robust, low-volume bulk reagent dispenser for screening applications.

Designed to dispense up to two common reagents, the Latitude dispenses a wide range of volumes (50nl to 20ul) into 96, 384, and 1536 well plates.

With its touch screen display, programming is easy and takes only a few minutes to set up.

The Latitude has been designed for easy plate access to allow either manual plate placement or, using the remote control feature, integration with a wide variety of plate stackers and robotic systems.

Both the Equator HTS and Latitude are based on Deerac's proprietary spot-on low-volume dispensing technology.

The technology, which uses a novel, time-pressure valve design, provides high speed dispensing for low volume plates.

For example, a 1536-well plate can be filled in less than 15 seconds.

In addition, because of the simple valve design, it can be used with cells and beads with lifetime in excess of hundreds of thousands of dispenses.