Equipment
Liquid Handling Workstation – EasyPick Microlab STARlet
The EasyPick Microlab STARlet Hamilton workstation is contained in a sterile housing with a laminar flow of air drawn through a HEPA filter and is equipped with a high resolution CCD camera and a light table to image colonies, thus allowing fast and economical colony picking. It can also be used to dispense culture media in Deepwell plates and to manipulate about 3000 clones a day.
Liquid Handling Workstation – Microlab STAR
The Microlab STAR Hamilton workstation is equipped with 8 independent pipetting channels, a CO-RE 96 Probe head and a CO-RE gripping tool for plate displacement. A single position on the deck is mounted with an automated BVS Vacuum System with pressure monitoring feature. Two Heater Shaker devices are present, together with 10 thermostated positions for 96-well PCR or microtitre plates. A Swap robotic arm is able to transfer plates from the robotic deck to several positions outside of the deck such as microplate readers or plate stackers.
Microplate readers and spectrophotometers
Two microplate readers (Infinite M200 PRO by Tecan) allow UV/Vis absorbance and fluorescence measurements, together with chemiluminescence detection. One of these instruments is equipped with an injector module, which uses up to two injectors to trigger fast kinetic reactions.
Microfluidics Capillary Electrophoresis for Protein Characterization
A system (LabChip GXII, Caliper Life Sciences by Perkin Elmer) for automated electrophoretic separation of nucleic acids (RNA, DNA) and proteins provides a fast and easy way to analyze samples across a wide range of molecule and fragment sizes.
Analysis of biomolecular interactions
An Octet HTX platform (fortéBio – Pall Life Sciences) allows high-throughput analysis of biomolecular interactions in 96- and 384-well microplates. It enables real-time and label-free determinations of affinity, kinetics and concentration and it is thus highly suitable for characterization of drug candidates and development of possible applications. Up to 96 samples can be analyzed in parallel and hence, protein quantitation of 96 samples can be completed in a relatively short time. Rapid kinetics, epitope binding and epitope binning assays are made possible by the multiplexed biosensor formats. Furthermore, protein concentration can be measured in crude mixtures such as cell lysates or hybridoma supernatants, glycerol, or in up to 10% DMSO, which drastically reduces sample preparation time.
Protein Structural Analysis
Protein spotter
Our Marathon Classic Microarrayer (Arrayjet) is capable of handling six 96- or 384-well microplates for the source and uses an inkjet technology to create an array of proteins on up to 100 slides in one run. Spots can be as small as 50 µm in diameter and are obtained from ca. 100 pl of solution. The entire system works in a JetMosphere Environmental Control providing HEPA air filtration, temperature control and humidification control.
Infrared imager
Our 128×128 focal plane array detector FTIR imaging microscope (Agilent) allows to record 16384 spatially resolved infrared spectra in a few minutes in the mid-IR (5000-900 cm-1). As such, one image is sufficient to record the spectra of about 100 protein spots produced by the microarrayer. An automatic mapping allows the recording of larger areas. Our dedicated software allows instant computation of protein secondary structure content (an index of protein denaturation) and various parts of the spectra allow the quantification of phosphorylations and glycosylations. Any other molecule can be quantified after proper calibration. Sensitivity is very high as protein monolayers already provide excellent spectra.
