Culturing techniques automated

An automated in-tube solid-phase microextraction HPLC method for NNK and several metabolites have been developed by Mullett et al. ° In-tube SPME is an on-line extraction technique where analytes are extracted and concentrated from the sample directly into a coated capillary by repeated draw-eject steps. A tailor-made polypyrrole-coated capillary was used to evaluate their extraction efficiencies for NNK and several metabolites in cell cultures. This automated extraction and analysis method simplified the determination of the tobacco-specific A-nitrosamines, requiring a total sample analysis time of only 30 min. 

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques allow one to amplify small quantities of target DNA typically by 10" to 10 times and determine in a semi-quantitative manner the presence of specific microorganisms. PCR analysis can be automated and provide turnaround times on the order of hours rather than the 3 to 5 days required for culture techniques (Atlas, 1991). Quantitation of PCR is accomplished by most probable number methods or by calibration with the function = C ,j i x 2", where C is the concen-... 

PLATE 3 Cell culture of plants now takes place in individual containers cared for by hand. Automation of plant cell culture using chemical engineering techniques could improve the yields and economics of plant cell culture and expand the range of its applications in the production of new species and hybrids. Courtesy, Monsanto Company. 

Techniques exist, however, that are intended to free a person s awareness from the dominance of the structure, of the machinery that has been culturally programmed into him. in terms of the radical view of awareness, whatever basic awareness ultimately is, there are techniques that at least produce the experience of freeing awareness partially or wholly from the continual dominance of structure, of moving toward a freer, more wide-ranging awareness rather than a consciousness that is primarily a function of the automated structure... 

Recently, Merck KGaA in Darmstadt in cooperation with AnalytiCon AG (Berlin) presented a HPLC-based Workstation (SepBox) designed for the extraction and separation of plant material in a more preparative scale which has also successfully been used for the separation of secondary metabolites from culture broths of microorganisms. On the other hand, it has been shown that automated solid phase extraction (SPE) can achieve high quality samples from cultivation of microorganisms in an easy and cost-effective manner. In the latter case modified Zymark RapidTrace modules have been used in the automation concept which advantageously does not need HPLC-techniques [353]. 

First, cell assays in digital microfluidic devices have been implemented recently by Wheeler and coworkers [3,4]. In this pioneering work, both cells in suspension and adherent were cultured and assayed in nanoliter volumes. The new DMF techniques outperformed standard cell culture and assay methods by the 30-fold increase in sensitivity, 100-fold reduction in reagent volumes and cell number, gentler cell manipulation, and reduced number of assay steps. DMF-based cell assays show great potential for automating and simplifying cell assays especially in a multiplexed format. 

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