Tecan liquid-handling and microplate technologies are being used by researchers at Stanford Genome Technology Center in the study of yeast genomics.
The laboratories Access (automated cell, compound and environmental screening system) robot project is combining several Tecan systems to develop a fully automated platform for phenotype analysis of mutant strains and/or strains subjected to small molecule treatment for chemo-genomic assays.
Dr Michael Proctor, a research and development scientist at the Center, said: 'For a number of years we have been developing the Access platform to eliminate many of the manual steps of plating, growing, screening and data analysis of yeast cultures in liquid medium, and automation has resulted in much higher-resolution data and improved reliability.
'Our latest system us based around a Freedom Evo 150 liquid-handling workstation, with integrated incubator shakers, plate readers and pipetting stations to allow inoculation, re-plating and saving samples to a cold station.
'We have a Safire2 microplate reader on the new platform, giving a high throughput capacity and enabling many cultures to be grown and monitored in parallel.
'Integration of the workstation's Evoware and the microplate reader software with our Lims enables us to run many multi-step, multi-plate simultaneous optical density (OD) and fluorescent assays with just a few barcode scans of source drug and growth plates.
'This system is extremely flexible, allowing several users to run different assays in parallel for maximum productivity,' he added.
