Automated Solutions Accelerate Crop Improvement

Scientists at the Institute of Plant Breeding at the University of Kiel, Germany, are using a Tecan Freedom EVO® liquid handling work station to perform high throughput DNA purification and normalisation, for the development of TILLING® (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) pro grams for rape seed and sugar beet. Tecan has worked closely with Macherey-Nagel to develop an automated protocol for the NucleoSpin® 96 Plant DNA extraction kits, helping the Institute achieve high throughput extraction.

“We chose Tecan’s workstation because we needed an automated, high throughput system to extract and normalise DNA for PCR amplification,” explained Professor Christian Jung, Director of the Institute of Plant Breeding. Using the Freedom EVO platform, in combination with the Macherey-Nagel extraction kits, we can obtain highly purified DNA, able to withstand long-term storage. This is a huge help for our projects, eliminating the need to normalise thousands of DNA samples by hand, and improving the quality of the extracted DNA compared with manual techniques. Although we have huge numbers of DNA extractions to perform, the Freedom EVO has the capacity to cope with these sample numbers.”