How to easily perform serial dilutions with electronic pipettes (video)

How to easily perform serial dilutions with electronic pipettes

One of the more common applications being used in labs today, is the serial dilution. And INTEGRA electronic pipettes offer a mode, which will help you carry out all pipetting steps required to perform a dilution. For example adding diluent to the plate, adding sample to the plate, mixing them together and then carrying out the dilution. With this pipette you can aspirate a specific volume of sample, carry out your mix sequence and when you're finished, your first aspirated volume remains in the tip, as a last suspense. Before we start we'll assume that a 96 well plate has already been filled with a diluent beforehand.

The INTEGRA electronic pipette can also be used to fill the plate with diluent, either by using a repeat dispense program or by using a custom step-based program. In which every step of the serial dilution can be defined and carried out in one simple program. To set all the factors for your dilution, enter the serial dilution program from the main menu. Here we set the volume of the sample, which is to be diluted across the plate and then how much of the diluent and the sample together should be mixed in each well.

After the mix is finished, the volume we inputted and aspirate, will be aspirated again and that will be brought to the next well.Thereby giving us our dilution. Other factors which can be changed are the number of times the mix is done on each well, generally the higher the number the more homogeneous the mix. The number of rows in a plate, here we can set it to the full plate or 12 and also the speeds of aspiration dispense and mix can be individually adjusted, depending on the liquid type.

Once that's all been set, simply start the program by aspirating your source and dispensing it into the first column. The mixing will be performed as we programmed it. And once that's done we'll simply take the diluent sample mix and bring it to the next column and repeat. During the process the screen gives the user a lot of information, to help make the process as easy as possible. The step being performed, the current row and the next step coming up.

Once the program is finished, you'll be left with mixed sample diluent in your tip and you can decide, what you want to do with it. Either back in the last well or into another container. The serial dilution mode with INTEGRA's electronic pipettes save a lot of time and aggravation. And they'll help you to perform a dilution more accurately and precisely. And that's a real benefit for any lab.

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