I’ve been working with Hamilton robots for the past 10 years, so my expertise is solely on STARs and Nimbus systems.
And here is the pickle, I am currently running DDI incubations with microsomes on a Hamilton STAR, in 96 well plate formate. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving to 384 plate formate, in order to up the capacity, but the Hamilton 384 head only has a pipette range from 1µl and up, which is too large a volumen for moving to this changed formate (we dilute test items 1:100). Tecan Fluent and the Biomek i7 on the other hand, both go down to 0.5µl from what I can find on them, which would allow us to do incubation in 50µl volumens.
So I guess I have two separate questions I’m hoping you lovely people might be able to help me with.
Do any of you have experience with running DDI microsome incubations in a 384 formate, with success? i.e. are the plates heated evenly across all wells, and are there any issues with having enough available oxygen in the matrix, for the assays to run?
And a more general question, if you had to chose between a Hamilton STAR, a Tecan Fluent and a Biomek i7, in terms of functionality and programming, what would be your choice?
Thank you all so much, I figured there could be no better place to ask than here
Well you don’t strictly need a 384 head to use 384 well plates. I usually do like “quadrant pinning” with the 96 channel.
As far as the precision limits, I’m curious what your reference is there. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule that one robot can do 0.5uL and another can’t. You’d really want the CoVs from each robot at that range. They’re probably pretty similar but if a few %s make a big difference you’ll probably want that comparison.
As far as programming, it depends what you’re looking for. GUI or pure coding?
I’m in the process of having to purchase a new robot either way, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to swap from a 96 head to a 384 thankfully. But that is a very fair point!
The 0.5µl come from the 3 robots specifications. Both Tecan Fluent and Biomek i7 list 0.5µl (+/-10% CV) as their lower limit, where as Hamilton lists 1µl as the lower limit both for the 96 head and the 384 heads.
Programming wise I am hoping for a GUI, at the moment I am the only user who can program the robot, which is simply too fragile a setup long term, so I am hoping for something fairly user friendly.
This may be anecdotal and loosely related - but in my experience the Biomek 96-channel MC is rock solid. I’d expect this performance to translate similarly to a 384 channel variety. However… The tips for biomeks have given me so many headaches (See the variety of lists here). It is entirely possible (and most likely) that the manufacturer of the 384 tips is different than mfr of 96-format tips, but it’s worth consideration for your potential new instrument; There might be external factors which may impact your pipetting accuracy greatly.
I’d also suggest reaching out to the technical teams of each instrument mfr directly and ask for the testing parameters where the volume ranges were detected. Maybe there’s some surprises, like potentially Hamilton didn’t test below 1 µL? I’d be very surprised if the STAR 384 performed worse than Tecan/Biomek - I’ve always considered their instruments very strong in the volume accuracy category.
