Curious if any of you have devised any solutions to this:
Our lab is running STARs constantly, with dozens of methods and variable inputs to each. This results in a mess of partially used tip racks that have to be manually consolidated regularly. I am hesitant to implement tip counting libraries to combat this since the user experience would become more variable. Additionally, many of these patterns are left by the CO-RE head, which the library doesn’t really tackle.
Any outside the box solutions? I would love to create a method that checks for empty slots in a tip rack and fills it with the right size tip, and run overnight or something. Not sure how I could differentiate between 50s and 300s though, and do NOT want to mix those up.
You could use error handling to check whether or not a tip was present in a position by trying to pick it up. For 300uL vs 50uL, you would presumably have some prior information about the type of tip in a given rack. If you are writing a separate method for the tip consolidation, perhaps having a method specific to each type of tip so the user doesn’t mix up different types.
I do not have a star, but the same half empty tip box issue.
At the moment I have created a script on our Fluent that does a tip pick-up and drop-tip into an empty tip-box. just run the script in as many iterations as I need and then I have nice full set of boxes at the end.
I understand that you do not have a barcode scanner on board. So I think you have to do seperate runs for the tip types as @Stefan recommended. Otherwise the tip types can be identified by the rack barcode. Maybe also @Shaik has a tool for tip identification.
However, regarding the rack filling:
I would do a tip pickup for each position, catch no tip found errors to recognize empty positions, map these empty positions in a sequence and whenever you are succesfully picking a tip, place it on the next free position of the sequence.
This was my initial idea, but I am concerned about the 300 vs 50. We do have an autoloader, so I could rely on barcode scanning but I may have to also just visually check the filters when I unload the tip racks.
You could track the tips with the TipCounting Lib in the database, without enabling your end-user to modify the tip sequence. By doing so, you know the tip tip and empty positions for every possible tip that is used on your deck and could go from there. That’s how I implemented it:
export the tip sequence of (e.g. 1000 uL tips)
generate a “full” sequence of tips (e.g. all possible positions for 1000 uL on a given deck setip)
Yes this works. I have programmed it before. You can use a tip pickup command with auto error recovery to do this. Basically you load x number of partial racks and x number of empty racks where the tips are ejected.
A simple dialog in the beginning let’s you select tip type.
It was in a previous job so would have to ask if they are willing to share it.
Sorry for the slow response. I wanted to test this on a system before posting. I put together a quick Tip Consolidation method which uses existing functionality within the STAR Tools :: Tip Tools library. You can download the method from the link below:
There are required libraries that need to be installed if you don’t already have them installed included.
Import the pkg using recovery mode and select no to all for overwriting files.
Setup:
Do not associate a layout with the method. It will build one for you at run time based on your system.
Depending on if you have filter or non-filter tips you will need to set this variable to match.
This is important so the barcode mask matches the expected masks. The autoload will scan the barcodes to make sure you have the appropriate racks loaded.
The method will load a tip carrier starting at the minimum track set in the method. By default, it will start at track 1 and will add a new carrier every 6 tracks as needed.
The method will ask what type of tips you are consolidating and how many racks are being consolidated.
Afterwards you need to tell the system where the tips currently are using the tip counter view. When you finish updating the sequence, it will begin loading the carrier(s) and will proceed with the transfer of tips.
