Sub-microlitre pipettes for OpenTrons

Hi

I need to pipette 0.5uL volumes or lower (0.2uL would be great). The P20 we have can’t manage below 1uL. Are there any third party suppliers of sub-microlitre pipettes which are compatible with OpenTrons? Failing that, are their any guides on how we might develop and integrate our own? We can spend a little money on this as the only alternative would be to buy a whole new spotting system (BioDot, Scienion, GeSim, or similar).
Many thanks!

Hi!

We were on the same journey some time ago and while we didn’t find the right pipette we did get to plan the implementation for it

Firstable, you need an OEM pipette module like Sartorious R Line - unfortunately that one doesn’t fit your volume needs - and then decide how you will mount it to the Robot Gantry.

I wouldn’t necessarily try to retrofit it into a standard Opentrons Pipette, neither in the positioning nor the connection.

We planned to write a driver of its own but not include it as part of the opentrons library - just use it as an external hardware controlled by python. We’ve incorporated custom hardware before an included it in between opentrons_api steps. It works just fine for most cases.

If you do find a pipette module that suits you, please share!

Best

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Thanks for the reply!
After some re-calibration we managed to dispense 0.5ul volumes using our P20 with good enough results. This will probably do for now, but if we do end up trying to implement a third party pipette module I’ll let you know how it works out (and will no doubt need to ask more questions along the way!).

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@DrG, just curious, what sort of %CV/accuracy are you getting at 0.5ul?