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Caliper LabChip GX instrument

Date: 2009-12-01 19:06:50 Member: Agnieszka Lichanska Category: Product Discipline: Life Sciences Link:

I was looking for a solution to visualizing a large number of PCR products for size estimation and their quantification. The traditional method is to use a gel system. Microfluidic instruments like BioAnalyzer or Experion are an alternative but are not suitable for high throughput experiments as both of them can run less than 20 samples simultaneously.

After looking closer at the LabChip GX system from Caliper I decided that the system is perfect for what we need. It can process 96 well plate in 45 minutes, a single gel mixture preparation allows to run 4 of 96-well plates or 1x384 well plate. The preparation of the instrument for a run is simple and once a chip is prepared it can stay in the instrument for 8 hours.

The results gave us an amazing amount of information, sizes, concentrations and purity of all the products in a fraction of the time it would take us to run, visualize and analyze a gel. With ability to import templates (in .csv format) with expected sizes of the products we could pre-filter results as they were appearing on the screen. The software used to control instrument and analysis of data is easy to use and allows custom export of data.

As most microfluidic instruments LabChip can be clogged by debris in the sample. However, a few simple steps allow to unclog it. PCR reactions do not have debris but an excessive amount of large DNA fragments can cause a similar effect.

We got a great training from Caliper technical staff and were able to effectively use the instrument and train new staff on how to use it.

LabChip GX is definitely an extremely useful instrument for labs with high throughput analysis of PCR fragments. We are only interested in analysis of DNA but LabChip can also be used for analysis of RNA and protein.

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