Liquid Handling
Nothing to sneeze at: High-throughput handling of echinacea samples for MALDI-TOF MS
It’s December, and chances are you have had a cold in the past few weeks. If you take dietary supplements like echinacea, you may be relying on high-throughput liquid handling to help ensure that your herbal remedy is exactly what you expect it to be (whether or not it can really works is another question).
The growing popularity of plant-derived dietary supplements is creating new challenges for regulatory authorities, one of these being the monitoring of products for consistence in quality, botanical authenticity, and possible presence of adulterants. The need to process large and increasing numbers of product samples is leading to bottlenecks in analytical laboratories, and generating demand for novel solutions in high-throughput sample handling.
In a recent issue of the Journal of Biomolecular Techniques, researchers from the Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, in collaboration with Genomic Solutions, describe the development of a streamlined scheme for the systematic preparation of plant samples for matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry (MS). MALDI-TOF MS is a useful method to determine biomarker profiles in both plants and animals, but requires extensive sample preparation prior to analysis.
For high-throughput MALDI-TOF MS analysis of multiple plant samples, the Midwest investigators developed an automated, high-throughput sample processing scheme that was designed to be simple, reproducible, and streamlined in terms of liquid handling procedures. Off-the-shelf echinacea samples were first extracted and centrifuged, then transferred to a ProPrep liquid handling robotic system from Genomic Solutions. This workstation was programmed to carry out supernatant extraction, liquid transfer, mixing, and sample deposition onto MALDI plates. This combination of high-throughput sample handling and MALDI-TOF MS proved to be a useful tool for the rapid analysis of large numbers of echinacea samples.
New Peristaltic Pump Enhances Quality Control at F. Hoffman-La Roche AG
