Abstract
The cover of JALA this month demonstrates the power of automation to gather, analyze, and report useful analytical information without a local human presence. An automated laboratory designed to study potential human health hazards on Mars is being readied for deployment in the year 2001 by a team including Dr. Stephen Fuerstenau, Ph.D. at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena, California.
Earth based technologies will be the focus of EuroLabAutomation, a European conference, supported by the ALA, in September at Oxford University
(http://Eurolabautomation.org). This meeting will feature laboratory automation, accompanied by an exhibition displaying novel automation products to increase productivity and assure consistent quality in the laboratory.
This issue of JALA contains, in part, the proceedings of the European MipTec conference. MipTec (Microplate Technologies) was held in Basel, Switzerland on June 12–15, 1998. This year's conference highlighted dramatic new advances in the ever increasing density of microplates and automated equipment designed to fill, wash, and quantitate the contents of these vanishing small wells. For example, the article by Larsson et al describes a compact disc based cell culture system that achieves a density of 1300 cell culture chambers on a 10 cm diameter disc. High density microplates not only increase the efficiency of laboratory procedures, they can account for major savings in reagent costs for high throughput screening. — Page 58
Similar analytical density increases have been seen in high throughput screening.
Knebel describe the use of a “square-rounded” well geometry to gain maximum advantage of the 1536 well microplate for high throughput screening. Page 40
Similar advances are being created for analysis of combinatorial chemistry products. High throughput sample preparation for MALDI-TOF mass spectroscopy in 96 extraction column format is described in the article by Sheer et al. Similar advances in automated high-throughput flow injection analysis electrospray mass spectroscopy for the rapid analysis of the results of combinatorial chemistry appears in the article by Gorlach et al. Page 56
Advances in all aspects of clinical and pharmaceutical automation are proceeding at a cosmic pace. The attendees of EuroLabAutomation and LabAutomation in San Diego (January 30 – February 3rd, http://labautomation.org) will get an advance look at the technologies that will soon be reported on the pages of JALA.