ACCESSing yeast genomics

Tecan’s systems are providing an integrated solution to researchers at Stanford Genome Technology Center for the study of yeast genomics.

Ulrich Schlecht, Julia Oh and Michael Proctor

The laboratory’s ACCESS (automated cell, compound and environmental screening system) robot project is combining several Tecan technologies to develop a fully automated platform for phenotype analysis of mutant strains and/or strains subjected to small molecule treatment for chemo-genomic assays. Dr Michael Proctor, a research and development scientist at the Center, explained: “For a number of years we have been developing the ACCESS platform to eliminate many of the manual steps of plating, growing, screening and data analysis of yeast cultures in liquid medium, and automation has resulted in much higher resolution data and improved reliability. Our latest system is based around a Freedom EVO® 150 liquid handling workstation, with integrated incubator shakers, plate readers and pipetting stations to allow inoculation, re-plating and saving samples to a cold station.”

“We have a Safire2™ microplate reader on our new platform, giving a high throughput capacity and enabling many cultures to be grown and monitored in parallel. Integration of the workstation’s Freedom EVOware® and the microplate reader software with our laboratory LIMS enables us to run many multi-step, multi-plate simultaneous optical density (OD) and fluorescent assays with just a few barcode scans of source drug and growth plates. This system is extremely flexible, allowing several users to run different assays in parallel for maximum productivity.”

To find out more on Tecan’s Freedom EVO workstations, visit www.tecan.com/freedomevo.