New Tecan phase separator

Hi,

Tecan just release a Fluent with pressured based phase separator. Does anyone here have any comments or opinion on this technology vs imaged based blood separation? I like the idea of not label peeling. However, I am wondering how well it works. Image based sometimes needs manual intervention. I would appreciate any comments.

2 Likes

I caught some internal information and runs before I left Tecan and the FCA upgrade was very impressive. The pressure based sensing will reduce user intervention as the handling can be finely tuned and self correct based on pressure differences on aspiration much like the clot detection, which can be super sensitive or tuned down to fit your tolerances.

2 Likes

Oh that’s interesting! Do you see other use cases?

I always wanted a fine control pressure sensing to build a macroscript process to automatically handle wide variations in liquids but this is a hard technical challenge for very viscous samples. I think I would use this most for automatic measuring that a thick solution is well mixed before sampling out.

I could also see it being used in orgainic chemical reaction workup partitions between aqueous and solvent washing for molecule extraction. So combi-Chem process. Also may not have wide use but would be interesting if it could cope with this.

I have seen some antibodies phage selection methods use oil water interfaces so could be tuned for this.

2 Likes

I wonder if you could pair this tech with column technologies for better results or precision

1 Like

Did you end up performing the upgrade?

It’s interesting and I’ve heard positive feedback. Unfortunately I don’t see any LC examples so I’ll have to build something from scratch unless someone from Tecan can provide examples.

Let me know what you need and I can try getting it to you.

1 Like

I’ve spent past few months building/desiging my own Phase Sep scripts for a variety of applications - happy to answer any questions/lessons learned

been able to successfully detect various “phases” - image shows the slightest transition into buffy coat layer which system detected & then stopped

2 Likes