Acquisition of a Robotic Liquid Handler

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): VCU has established a Spotted Arraying Facility under the umbrella of the current Nucleic Acids Research Facilities sponsored and supported by the School of Medicine and the Massey Cancer Center. Critical to the continued advancement of this Core is the acquisition of a Robotic Liquid Handler for processing and purifying PCR products for spotting. We have elected to purchase a Beckman Biomek FX Robotic Liquid Handling Workstation. 'Core' instrumentation already available to support this facility includes: (1) Four DNA Thermocyclers, two 96 well and two 384 well instruments; (2) Robbins Hydra 96 Channel Pipetting Systems; (3) A BioRobotics, Inc. MicroGrid II Arraying System; (4) A GSI Lumenics ScanArray 4000 Standard Biochip Scanning System; (5) The Bioinformatics Computational Core Laboratory and software; (6) Ultra Low Temperature Freezers (3) for clone storage. This instrumentation is located in a newly renovated about 500 ft2 laboratory, maintained by a Ph.D. level research assistant professor (Dr. Darrell Mallonee), and a technical assistant. This MicroArraying Core was established with funds from an NIH SIG (Buck PI), and from a variety of University sources (Life Sciences, School of Medicine, Massey Cancer Center). Funds for maintenance of the instrumentation are provided by user chargeback fees, the School of Medicine, Massey Cancer Center, and VCU Life Sciences. The rate-limiting phase of our operations is now preparation of PCR products for spotting. Our Robbins instrument is not sufficiently versatile, and we must acquire a Robotic Liquid Handler for this application. In fact, our spotted arraying services have been limited by the lack of a versatile Robotic Liquid Handler. We have examined Robot Liquid Handlers from multiple companies (Packard, Tecan, Beckman, Qiagen, etc.), and have opted to acquire the Beckman Biomek FX Robotic Liquid Handling Workstation.