Work Your Mosquito Smarter New Release of Software for Mosquito® Nanolitre Liquid Handler

TTP Labtech announced the release of version 2.7 software for its easy-to-use nanolitre liquid handler, mosquito®, to benefit screeners as well as protein crystallographers. The new functionality improves serial dilution set-up for screeners, automates new applications for protein crystallographers and enhances the new mosquito X1 hit-picking system.

mosquito's software supports worklists by reading CSV files from Microsoft Excel to generate protocols and write results to CSV for display in Excel. This is ideal for many screening applications as it gives a simple and very flexible method for editing complex pipetting protocols or making changes on the go, without detailed knowledge of the instrument. It also makes it easy for the user to cross-reference worklists with the actual pipetting results.

New multi-aspirate protocols enable mosquito to automate additive screens. For protein crystallographers, the "aspirate, aspirate, dispense" capability allows a combination of solutions to be dispensed simultaneously with additional mixing if required resulting in perfect drop formation with no protein evaporation. It also allows crystallographers to set up multiple conditions in one well by creating several multi-component drops, allowing different constructs, volume ratios or protein concentrations to be assessed at the same time.

Improved X and Y movement also allows the single tip mosquito X1 to pipette in any location on any vessel that will fit on mosquito's deck. This allows extremely accurate drop placement on a range of non-standard plates or surfaces such as mass spec chips, microscope slides or cover slides.

These changes further enhance an instrument already known for its flexibility. mosquito can pipette a wide range of viscosities accurately, is able to address different plate formats in the same protocol, and has no need to change the head for differing applications.