Hello! Sorry if this has been asked before but I couldn’t find anything on the forum. I wanted to know if there is a way to have the robot read a file, and then depending on the amount of samples there are, choose to use the 8 channels or the 96 MPH. We are going from 96 well plates into 384 well plates, where the samples in the 96 well plates need to be in triplicate on the 384 well plates, and sometimes the 96 well plates are full and sometimes they are not. Same with the 384 well plates, sometimes the plates are full and mastermix is added to every well using the 96 MPH, and sometimes the plates are partially full and we use the 8 channels. It would be great if I didn’t have to make a different protocol for each use case, but so far I haven’t figured out a way to do it. Thanks in advance!
You could introduce logic that states something like this after having Venus “count” the transfers:
if sample_count <= 8, pick up tips, aspirate, dispense and eject with the 8 probes. ### You can also change this sample count to be whatever number you like.
else sample_count >8, perform the steps with the 96 MPH.
Awesome I will try that thanks!
I’m not sure if you’re aware of the Hamilton Tip Support? It allows shifted tip pickup on the 96 MPH. You can pick up tips column or row wise. Say if you had 23 samples to transfer, just pick up 24 tips from the Tip Support and then pipette away.
@bowlineknot Thanks for the suggestion! We do have the tip support, but for this protocol we only want to use a reservoir if we have a full 384 well plate, and anything less we want to use a strip tube or a single column on a deep well plate.
If most of your plates are more than half full, my suggestion is to use 8-channels remove tips from those corresponding empty wells, then use 96 head loads the leftover tip box, much faster this way
Hi, I had a similar use case before, and although the approach was relatively complex, it was entirely feasible to implement on Hamilton Venus.
You can define a sample count threshold. If the number of samples is below this threshold, the robot uses the 8-channel head. Otherwise, it switches to the 96-channel MPH for higher throughput.
However, since plates are often only partially filled—and samples may be distributed across non-contiguous wells—the 96 MPH cannot always be used directly. To handle this, the 8-channel head is first used to pick up or place tips at specific positions on the tip rack, aligning the tip distribution with the sample layout on the plate. This ensures that the 96 MPH processes only the relevant wells, regardless of their positions.
To support this workflow, a separate application (e.g., written in C#) can be used to process the sample and tip layout data. The program generates intermediate files, which are then read by the Venus method to dynamically build the appropriate tip usage and pipetting sequences.