How to work with automatic tip spacing on electronic pipettes (video)

How to work with automatic tip spacing on electronic pipettes

If you've never seen INTEGRA's VOYAGER pipette before, you're in for a real treat. Many pipetting applications can only be done with a single channel pipette, simply because the source and target vessels are different for mats. Multichannel pipettes typically make pipetting work more precise and faster, however they simply don't fit with the spacing. That is, of course, until the VOYAGER came along. The point of this video is, to demonstrate, how simple and easy it is, to set tips spacing, using the VOYAGER. 

First, enter the Tip Spacing screen from the main menu. From here, you can save either 2 or 3 defined tip spacing positions. Once you've defined, how many positions, you can then save, what the tip to tip spacing should be. Simply select the position and teach the pipette what the spacing should be. This is easily done by simply holding open or close, and the tips will physically move as well. 

Allowing you to visually match the tips spacing to the source and target vessels. 96 well plates have a spacing of 9mm, while 384 well plates have a spacing of 4.5mm. Once the positions have been defined, you can enter any program from the main menu and you'll see, that your save positions are on the bottom left and right. You'll operate this pipette just like any other VIAFLO electronic pipette, with the added functionality of tip spacing. 

There's another way to do this, which requires you to only press the RUN button for all the actions, which the pipette performs. From the main menu, enter the custom programsand make a new one. Give it a name and you can then define every action that happens, when RUN is pressed. For example, the first step is a tip spacing, so I can have the tips in the correct position to aspirate from the source vessel - let's say it's a 96 well plate.

The next step can be an aspirate and the next another tip spacing for the target vessel.In this case a 384 well plate. The final step is then a dispense. I can add any number of other steps for more complicated protocols, including mixing or text prompts for information, and so on. And when I press the RUN button all the steps, which I have saved, will now be executed in order. The same program in principle can be declined to two deplate transverses as well.

The VOYAGER pipette was made to give you all the advantages of a multichannel pipette, with these tricky reformatting protocols. And the programming is a synch, especially adding the tip spacing.

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