I have created a script that will aspirate water from a 100uL trough and dispense 45uL into 88 wells of a 96-well PCR plate using the reagent distribution smart command and 1000uL filtered SBS tips. I chose to use the smart command because the amount of plates may vary each time (1 to 12 plates, selected by the user at the start of the script). After distributing water to all of the wells, the script then uses Sample Transfer smart command to aspirate and dispense liquid from multiple 96-deep well plates into the 96-well PCR plates.
My only complaint is that when doing the water dispense, even though I have the max tip reuse and the max multi dispenses set to 132, the smart command will dispense each column of the plate into all of the plates (plate number defined by a variable that is set by the user at the start of the script) and then get a new set of tips. I would like it to use the same 8 tips for all of the water dispenses without getting new tips, which you would think would be achieved by specifying the max tip reuse and max multi dispense.
Does anyone have any suggestions on achieving this without using a gwl to create the worklist and modifying the W’s in the gwl file to prevent the tip ejection? I would like to avoid the GWL method since the number of plates can vary for each run and would like to make executing the script as simple as possible for the end user. Is there something I can add to the liquid class microscript for the water to prevent the tip ejection? Attached is a screen shot of the reagent distribution command.
My assumption with SMART commands is that the Get Tip and Drop Tip is a non-negotiable. Meaning that if you want to iterate across plates, it will grab new tips but someone can double check that…
There’s also a Reagent Distribution GWL command that can allow you to iterate much easier than the SMART commands IMO. You can even dictate the range of the plate (starts and ends, plus wells to exclude) but I don’t know if that drops tips every time.
You could also use a Variable Pipetting Loop which can take numPlates as an input to perform loops across multiple plates, you’ll have to manually introduce a condition to skip the final column but you can iterate by doing something like - “96 Well Skirted PCR [” & i & “]” where i is an integer that is manually set by the operator.
Thanks @luisvillaautomata. I think the variable pipetting loop might actually be a viable option without altering my current script workflow too much. I will play with that function and see what I can come up with.
I have some tips for using it effectively, I don’t like to rely on their aspirateCount() and dispenseCount() functions too much so I’ll usually feed them to an index variable and manually iterate (especially if you aspirate and dispense multiple times within a loop)
As others mentioned, the “smart” commands for FluentControl aren’t all that smart. I’m convinced they don’t give the user control over tip re-use in a simple manner with the objective of selling more tips . I also either just make a worklist or use variable well offsets in a loop.
I couldn’t agree more. I noticed the same sort of logic from then when we paid them to write our first script when we first got the machine before I was comfortable with doing it myself. We reached out to them before accepting the script and they claimed that they didn’t feel comfortable writing the script to reuse tips any more than it already did because of contamination possibilities.
. I also either just make a worklist or use variable well offsets in a loop.