No tip return (re-rack) for biomek i5?

Beckman-Coulter
1

I have a cell culture protocol that reuses tips for PBS dispensing from a reservoir well (tips never touch samples) on an Opentrons Flex and I might be moving to a facility with a Biomek i5 (span 8 pipettes) instead. But I just heard that there is no tip return function for the Span 8, this would drastically increase my tip usage! Is there no workaround or way to return tips to the tip rack??

For context, I would be using 1 column of 8 tips with tip return versus 24 columns of 192 tips (two tip boxes) if there was no tip return! Crazy…

2 Likes
2

Unfortunately, that do be how it is. :frowning:

However, there is this video floating around from way back when. It definitely CAN be done, but for whatever reason, Beckman never implemented it to my knowledge.

I think the workaround is just to use the 96MC. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the 96 head is far superior to the 8-span, but either way that doesn’t help much if you’re inheriting existing machines.