Hamilton Mixing 96-Head Retraction

Hamilton (Venus)
1

Hello,
I have a 96 well plasma cleaner from IonField installed on my Hamilton Vantage deck. I am trying to aspirate and dispense with the 96-channel head in that position on the deck consecutively for 30 seconds. Right now, in between the aspirate and dispense steps the head is retracting up out of the plasma cleaner turning it off. Is it possible to set a fixed height for the head to remain at to “mix” up and down without coming out of the plasma cleaner?

I just want to note that I have explored a lot of the advanced options including the Z-move step in the dispense advanced options, turning off liquid level detection in both the aspiration and dispense steps, and our fixed height for both the steps is set to 0. Any thoughts?

2

It’s built into the firmware that on completing any step the head will return to Z travel before executing the next step.

Can you use a single Aspirate Step with the aspirate volume set to 0 and Mix Cycles = 30 and Mix Volume = whatever volume you are mixing?

If you want to do it in Aspirate and Dispenses you’ll need to roll your own firmware command library.

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3

Disable liquid following in the advance feature.

I was looking at that technology. How is it working?

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4

Hi, I am assuming that you are talking about the plasma cleaner, we have done only limited testing and have not conducted any testing on actual samples. But in theory and from the testing that we have done thus far it seems promising!

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5

Awesome! Please keep us updated on your results. A lot of interest in saving the planet :slight_smile:

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6

I agree with @KyleCook_GeNovu’s suggestion. Use the prerinsing/mix option under “Customize…” → “Advanced aspirate” in a “CO-RE 96 Head Aspirate” step should do the trick.

I am also interested in the IonField Systems plasma-cleaning technology - and I have been in contact with the company. I am curious to know more about your experience with this technology. How easy/difficult has it been to implement the plasma-cleaning device on your Hamilton Vantage, which tips are you cleaning and what are the tips being used for (application).

7

Hello,

It has been quite easy to install the plasma cleaner onto the deck. We have the Hamilton think that it is pipetting to a plate on a liquid waste rack. Then you can teach the position in the editor. From there we ended up using the prerinse mixing and then had it “dispense” above the wells of the plasma cleaner to make sure that the sensor would not be triggered again. We are trying to use the tips for media dispensing into a 384 well plate. (Have not conducted testing on whether or not the cells could be damaged from the cleaning cycles). But the tips we are using are the 300uL conductive filtered black tips from Hamilton, and they seem to be withstanding the 3 cleanings that we are aiming to do. (Just trying to dispense into all quadrants of the plate without changing tips). Since the media is also a more viscous material we are implementing a water wash in between from the dispense of the media into the plate and before the cleaning in the plasma cleaner.

I will have more updates as we are able to commence more testing. I hope this helps!

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8

This worked great for me thank you for this tip.

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9

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to follow up on this topic and state that the plasma cleaner testing did indeed clean the tips of drug but only of certain drugs. We discovered that the more cyclic rings/ complex chemical structures the drugs had the more difficulty we had removing it from the tips without melting the tips. So I would recommend this device for qPCR setups etc that do not require complex drugs. I hope this helps!

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