Labcyte Inc., a global biotechnology tools company revolutionizing liquid handling with acoustic dispensing, has introduced Echo liquid handler product family at the annual Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening conference. This innovative product expands Labcyte’s acoustic dispensing range by utilising a larger droplet volume to enable more rapid liquid transfers in the microliter range.
Acoustic dispensing is significantly enhancing personalised medicine programmes, streamlining DNA/RNA diagnostics testing, optimizing drug discovery programmes and accelerating life science research. The Echo 525 platform complements the current Labcyte product lines by enabling acoustic assay assembly for larger volume transfers.
Labcyte uses focused sound energy to dispense precisely-sized droplets from a source microplate well to a destination. The tipless, non-contact technology provides unmatched accuracy and precision and eliminates costs associated with pipette tips and waste disposal while conserving reagents and samples. The new Echo 525 liquid handler allows scientists to work across a wider range of assay volumes and continue to produce high-quality data by avoiding the problems associated with traditional pipetting systems. With a 25 nanoliter transfer increment, scientists can rapidly transfer volumes from hundreds of nanoliters up to 10-microliters with one instrument.
“The Echo liquid handler is a recognized gold standard for small molecule liquid handling, and low volume genomics and proteomics,” says Mark Fischer-Colbrie, CEO of Labcyte. “The introduction of the Echo 525 will make acoustic liquid handling the first choice for scientists across a broader spectrum of life science applications. This expansion of our product line will accelerate the adoption of acoustic liquid handling for next-generation sequencing, gene expression, genotyping, proteomics, cell health and molecular diagnostics.”
Acoustic liquid handling dramatically simplifies experimental setup and lowers cost while improving data quality, with no risk of contamination. In addition to these benefits of acoustic transfer, all Echo instruments incorporate Dynamic Fluid Analysis, a process that enables the transfer of a wide range of liquids automatically, without requiring operator calibration.
“We are very excited to be introducing the first rapid large-volume Echo platform,” says Fischer-Colbrie. “This breakthrough extends the benefits of acoustic transfer to more scientific research and discovery. Not only can scientists now transfer microliter volumes for a wide range of fluids without contact and without pipette tips, they never have to be burdened with instrument calibration again.”
Labcyte customers have published papers in peer-reviewed journals and received patents that clearly demonstrate discoveries and results that would have been impossible with traditional liquid-handling approaches - at a fraction of the cost. The Echo 525 liquid handler will enable further groundbreaking discoveries across a broader range of applications.