Hi all, Ive got what I think is a fairly quick question!
I am building a basic method on a Tecan Fluent, but am stuck on a step and looking for guidance. I have to pool samples across a 96w plate into a single column on the same plate (i.e. A1-A11 into well A12). I tried to get this to happen via the smart sample transfer command, and can see a possible path forward, but its a little messy (i.e. a smart command to pool each row). It seems like there should be a fast way to handle this. In past work I’ve used a variable to increment through locations. But on the Fluent, for Asp/Disp commands well selections seem to happen via the GUI, there isnt a place to input a variable/equation for column/Row. What am I missing? Are there dedicated variables for controlling locations on the active plate I just dont know about?
Extra Background: I work in a biology lab that is in the process of expanding its automated capabilities. I am the main person onsite familiar with automation, and am in charge of building most protocols. My experience is with other liquid handling platforms (Hamilton, Lynx, Etc) but this site just got a Tecan Fluent. Im a fairly experienced user of lab automation, but new to the Fluent. Resources seem to be a bit hard to find online, and my company wont spring for trainings yet.
I will also specify that using a Worklist and a .CSV file gives you greater control. Depending on the labware source, generally a 96-well plate will have 96 positions. You can tell the FCA to do 1-to-1 transfers, however those would be processed individually. The Sample Transfer screenshot above would (likely) process with all 8 tips simultaneously, although I’m not in the lab to verify and running the simulator remotely is a waste of time.
If you are using an older version of FC without the Sample Transfer command or would like to do something a little more custom, it’s also possible to use the well-offset field in Asp/Disp commands to accomplish the same thing.
With this and the tip mask stuff, you can do pretty complicated things, but I find it to be pretty hard to maintain. Be careful with off by one errors, ha.
Personally, I feel your pain on the lack of online resources.
In the Well Offset section of any SMART command or Aspirate/Dispense command you can introduce quite complex logic but it’s trapped within the GUI which makes it annoying to maintain later on. However if you can master worklisting (.gwl), you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Worklisting in the Fluent is similar to the EVO so there are a lot of resources for that in forums or online or in papers. You can probably ask your favorite LLM to help guide you.
Tecan has also expanded the worklisting capabilities for the Fluent a lot as well in the latest versions of FC.
You can do pooling without the smart command using the traditional dispense command. Here I’ve got it doing 8 dispenses to well A12 of the plate per your use case. The key to this is using the (easy to overlook) tip spacing icon which I highlighted in the image. This should work across nearly all versions of FluentControl software.
This approach would work for pooling samples in a different circumstance, but doesnt seem to work in this case. Duplicating these settings on my end doesnt condense a row into a single well. When I tested the method and looked at the subroutine that gets generated, 11 wells are getting pooled into 1, but it still processes down columns instead of across the rows. I am also on FluentControl v3.7
Your description says you want to condense across a row into a single well. So let’s take the first row, wells A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7 and A8 and condense to A12. Your screenshot of the aspirate command has the 1st column selected. The FCA channels can only spread in the y-direction, not in the x-direction. So to go across wells you would want 8 individual aspirate commands, one for A1, one for A2, etc., then going to A12 with the 8 number on the well using the single dispense command like is shown in your screenshot. Then you would do a 2nd transfer to do wells A9, A10 and A11 to condense to A12.
