ATC is using quantitative PCR techniques to assay transgenic plant cells and is using Tecan's Freedom EVO 100 liquid-handling workstation to automate pipetting tasks for these screens.
Tim Beddoes, a molecular biologist at ATC (Advanced Technologies Cambridge), said: 'There are a number of toxicants in cigarette smoke with the potential to cause disease and our aim is to find ways to alter pathways within the tobacco plant that are responsible for those compounds or their precursors.
'As part of this project, transgenic plants are created and we use Q PCR techniques to assay for introduced sequences.
'These screens require a lot of pipetting, which we used to perform manually, and with automation we can now run several thousand assays per month.
'Our current workstation set-up has an eight-channel arm and uses Tecan's 50ul disposable tips with 384-well format plates.
'The reproducibility is comparable to manual pipetting, but the tasks are performed much more quickly.
'We perform our QPCR in final reaction volumes of 25ul because using relatively small volumes obviously cuts down on reagent and sample costs and the 50ul tips are perfect for pipetting the 5ul of DNA and 20ul of master mix.
'The 50ul tip is also ideal for aliquoting fractions for experimental replicates.'
