Latest issue of inhouse magazine has articles of interest to scientists in drug discovery, genomics, proteomics and clinical diagnostics
The latest issue of the Tecan Journal (2/2004) provides scientists involved in drug discovery, genomics, proteomics and clinical diagnostics with a global insight into how advances in liquid handling, automation and detection are opening up applications in the life sciences.
An article from Florian Kaffarnik and Michael Feldbrugge of the Max-Plancke Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology (Marburg, Germany), describes how the Safire monochromator-based microplate reader is helping provide a better understanding of the interaction between plants and pathogenic fungi.
The research aims in the longer term to lead to improved methods for the control of plant diseases.
A new automated system to prepare samples before analysis by NMR is the subject of an article by Rutger Folmer from the structural chemistry laboratory of AstraZeneca R and D (Molndal, Sweden). The article describes how the automated system based on the Tecan Genesis platform has significantly improved both throughput and quality of data compared to the previously operated system that involved manual pipetting of compounds from 384-well plates. Automation of the NMR-based screening opens up applications in areas such as macromolecular interactions, fragment-based drug design and the analysis of drug metabolism.
A further report details the work of German pharmaceutical company Aventis Pharma Deutschland, which has been working on a procedure that releases the user from all the repetitive tasks by generating cell lines automatically.
Using a Tecan Genesis workstation system the high throughput screening group has successfully the automated transfection, antibiotic selection and cell maintenance steps of the process reducing the effective working time by 50-60% compared to the manual procedures previously employed.
Further articles in Tecan Journal 2/2004 describe how to take advantage of Tecan's helpdesk service and introduce fast and reliable microplate processing on the Freedom Evolyser - a new state-of-the-art enzyme immuno assay (EIA) analyser.
To receive a free copy of this and subsequent issues of the Tecan Journal please contact Tecan.
