Mosquito for high-throughput pipetting

The mosquito system was first introduced last year and was modified to allow for high-throughput use in May. It uses a continuous reel of micropipette heads that, because they are disposable, remove the risk of cross-contamination of samples and the need for washing with solvents.

The system can cope with 96-, 384 and 1536-well plates, and can deliver anything from just 50 nanolitres of liquid up to 1.2 microlitres. There is a growing trend towards the 384 and 1536 formats in high-throughput screening, because they use much lower quantities of reagents and are less expensive to run.

At the LabAutomation, the flexibility of the system was demonstrated by a poster showing that mosquito can deliver cells into both 384 and 1536 well plates without killing them.

Researchers at TTP Labtech​'s research facility in Melbourn, UK, used the mosquito deliver the cells and checked their viability using a laser scanning fluorescence microplate cytometer, which could detect cell proliferation. They also described an experiment in which the viability of the cells was tested after exposure to a number of chemicals, which demonstrated the utility of the approach for whole cell assays.

In the high-throughput version, each reel of the mosquito contains 35,000 micropipette tips, which are changed within the instrument. A single reel can deliver to more than 90 384-well plates before needing to be replaced, and has a plate handler that will allow it to process 200 plates without user intervention.

It can be used to transfer the contents of four 384 plate to a 1536, or 'clone' four daughter plates from one mother plate, according to the company.

A spokesman for TTP Labtech told DrugResearcher.com that the system is particularly useful for cell-based screening, but also has applications in protein crystallography and genotyping using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR).