Liquid automated handling

In coupled LC-GC, specific components or classes of components of complex mixtures are pre-fractionated by LC and are then transferred on-line to a GC system for analytical separation. Because of the ease of collecting and handling liquids, off-line LC-GC techniques are very popular, but they do present several disadvantages, e.g. the numerous steps involved, long analysis times, possibility of contamination, etc. The on-line coupled LC-GC techniques avoid all of these disadvantages, thus allowing us to solve difficult analytical problems in a fully automated way. 

High-throughput screening of molecular catalysts using automated liquid handling, injection and microdevices, Ghimia 56, 11 (2002) 621-626. 

An automated log P workstation using a shake-flask method and robotic liquid handling in 96-well plate format is commercially available [30]. The system is equipped with a diode-array spectrophotometer and equimolar nitrogen detector. 

In video microscopy, for instance, background is normally subtracted using differential interference contrast (DIC) [18]. This technique, which requires a number of manipulations from the user, may now be automated using a new method called polarization-modulated (PMDIC) [19,20], It requires the introduction of a liquid crystal electro-optic modulator and of a software module to handle difference images. PMDIC has been shown to bring improvements in imaging moving cells, which show a low contrast, as well as thick tissue samples. 

Automation using a robotic liquid handling system eliminated most of the tedious steps encountered with traditional manual extraction procedures. Automated 96-well SPE and LLE techniques using robotic liquid handlers have been successfully implemented to support high-throughput bioanalysis.5... 

Typical protein precipitation procedures use one volume of plasma plus three to six volumes of acetonitrile or methanol (or a mixture) with the internal standard at an appropriate concentration for the assay. Poison et al.102 reported that protein precipitation using acetonitrile eliminates at least 95% of the proteins after filtration or centrifugation, the supernatant can often be directly injected into the HPLC/MS/MS system. Usually this step is performed using 96-well plates that are ideal for semi-automation of sample preparation. Briem et al.103 reported on a robotic sample preparation system for plasma based on a protein precipitation step and a robotic liquid handling system that increased throughput by a factor of four compared to a manual system. 

Dehring, K.A. et al. 2004. Automated robotic liquid handling/laser-based nephelometry system for high throughput measurement of kinetic aqueous solubility. J. Pharm. Biomed. Anal. 36 447. 

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