Journal of Laboratory Automation

Mikroglas is a young, innovative and highly-specialized enterprise, which has special know-how in the development of microstructured glass components. Due to its unique properties, glass plays an important role in the field of microtechnology. Most important for many of these new applications are:

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its optical transparency and good fluorescence properties, allowing the user to carry out in-situ-measurements, e.g., to detect products after a chemical reaction directly in the device

The process of structuring FOTURAN will be described. With this technology different microfluidic devices have been manufactured. The channels have a width and depth of 50 μm up to 1 mm and a length of 20 mm up to 280 mm. Various parameters have been measured, e. g., the heat exchange and transfer coefficient for pure water as a function of the temperature. Also optical and thermal analysis techniques have been used to characterize the fluidic components. The results combined with advanced computational fluidic simulations lead to new solutions for different tasks.

The Institute of Metabolic Disease performs Supplemental Newborn screening for genetic biochemical abnormalities. A challenge facing many specialized high throughput-screening laboratories is fast, efficient data management, instrument integration, reporting, and invoicing. The Supplemental Screening laboratory operates three tandem mass spectrometry analyzers and screens samples for compounds that are not examined by typical newborn screening laboratories. The Institute of Metabolic Disease implemented NeoMate™ LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) to streamline sample demographic entry, data entry (manual, for more specialized tests and automated entry from instruments), automatic result reporting, follow-up and invoicing. The Institute consists of six departments which include; Supplemental Screening, Tissue Culture, Molecular Diagnostics, Neuropharmacology, Neurochemistry and Mass Spectrometry. These departments have unique requirements that differed from the high-throughput supplemental screening department. This required a system that offered the flexibility to provide custom interpretations, maintaining patient histories, sample storage, and graphing of patient results. This paper will focus on the process of implementing automation from project initiation, flow charting through software installation, instrument integration, system integration and going live.

High throughput parallel organic synthesis is now a common practice in discovery chemistry research. Argonaut's modular reaction cassette technology is aimed at parallel synthesis of focused small molecule libraries. The Trident™ automated platform has been designed to perform high throughput organic synthesis using this modular reaction cassette under truly inert conditions and in a robust, reproducible manner. This enables one to generate high quality libraries of small molecules and to access chemistry not normally amenable to automation.

Recently we have introduced a Sample Processing Station (SPS), which enhances the upstream and downstream sample handling capabilities of the Trident™ platform. Enhanced software capabilities also provide the Trident™ synthesizer with powerful reaction development and optimization capabilities. Application of this technology in the synthesis of a small library of 1,2-diarylbenzimidazoles using solution-phase chemistry is presented. A number of product purification and isolation protocols using polymer-bound scavengers are discussed.

We describe the planning, selection and implementation of an advanced clinical analysis automated system into a United Kingdom National Health Service District General Hospital.

Three dimensional (3D) microarrays utilizing hydrogel matrixes are becoming increasingly attractive as a desired format for bio-analysis. These materials offer significant advantages as a scaffolding for capture agents over more conventional two dimensional (2D) printed formats in both captures per site and the ability to provide an environment more closely resembling that of a free solution. Biocept has developed a flexible three dimensional polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymer based platform suitable for a variety of biological assays. This novel approach is simple, biocompatible and provides a high degree of reproducibility and very low variability in the final array.

Locked Nucleic Acid's or LNA are a new class of bicyclic DNA analogues that have a high affinity and specificity towards complementary nucleic acids. LNA containing oligonucleotides were used to develop a multiplex SNP genotyping assay based entirely on hybridization between capture probe and target. The approach incorporates a polymer microarray platform, photochemistry for immobilization of oligonucleotides onto microarrays, and a dedicated software tool to aid primer and capture probe design for highly multiplex genotyping. Furthermore, these technologies are combined in an integrated microfluidics platform for simple, highly multiplex and robust SNP genotyping.