Improving Reproducibility in Real-Time PCR

Integra has reported how a leading US clinical diagnostic laboratory has, using a VIAFLO 96 handheld electronic pipette, significantly improved the reproducibility and productivity with which it carries out Real-time PCR assays.

An important source of income for the clinical diagnostic lab is the screening of patient samples for the presence of disease markers by gene expression analysis. This analysis involved transferring pre-treated patient samples from a 96-well plate source to a target PCR plate, adding the PCR master mix and then subsequently analysing the plate by real-time PCR. The lab traditionally processed around 100 plates per day and the work was all done using 12-channel pipettes. Manually filling a 96-well plate, including changing of pipette tips after every sample transfer, was acknowledged to be a time consuming task and transferring the samples often proved to be prone to error.

The lab invested in an Integra VIAFLO 96 handheld electronic pipette to both load the patient samples into the plates and then to transfer the PCR master mix to the reaction plate. As a result - the work is now done in half the time. More important to the clinical diagnostic lab are two additional improvements. Transfer mistakes from plate to plate have been eliminated and now the light-sensitive PCR master mix is only exposed to daylight for a few seconds prior to the reaction, as all plate wells can be processed at the same time.

The Integra VIAFLO 96 is a handheld 96-channel electronic pipette that enables fast, precise and easy simultaneous transfer of 96 samples. Fast replication or reformatting of 96 and 384 well plates and high precision transferring of reagents, compounds and solutions to or from microplates is now as easy as pipetting with a standard electronic pipette into a single tube. Four pipetting heads with pipetting volumes up to 12.5µl, 125µl, 300µl or 1250µl are available for the VIAFLO 96. These pipetting heads are interchangeable within seconds enabling optimal matching of the available volume range to the application performed.