In a nutshell: Beatrice Marg-Haufe, Tecan

Beatrice Marg-Haufe, Market Manager Veterinary & Food at Tecan

Beatrice Marg-Haufe, Market Manager Veterinary & Food at Tecan

Beatrice Marg-Haufe, Market Manager Veterinary & Food at Tecan, discusses the advantages of liquid handling automation and the importance of correct sample preparation.

Founded in Switzerland in 1980, Tecan is a leading global provider of laboratory instruments and solutions in biopharmaceuticals, forensics and clinical diagnostics. One of the company’s focuses is on the development, production and distribution of advanced automation solutions for academic research as well as applied markets, which include the food industry and agricultural research. Food applications range from research applications to developing new testing methods and investigating new food additives or plant traits to routine quality control testing. “As varied as our customers are, so are the solutions Tecan can offer to the food market,” Beatrice Marg-Haufe, Market Manager Veterinary & Food, Tecan says.

“Some customers start out with a detection device and then, when their testing numbers increase, they move on to implement full workflows.” Standard applications include general sample preparation solutions, ELISA testing and molecular diagnostics. “Often, customers require specialised procedures or sample preparation techniques to complement their workflows,” Marg-Haufe explains. “We’re able to provide customers with the required modules and respective application support to tailor the platforms to their specific needs. It’s important for a liquid handling provider to react to specific customer needs, not only for straightforward applications such as ELISA or molecular applications, but also for customerspecific procedures.”

With such a diverse set of customers in the food industry, from academics in the laboratory to manufacturers on the production line, how easy is it to meet their automation needs? “They generally share the common need for increased sample security and assay robustness, together with longer walkaway times and higher throughputs for their research and diagnostic applications,” Marg-Haufe reveals. “Customers want to choose from a line of different products and modules to create the application they specifically need. As an example, in ELISA testing, while some customers need to test a few samples with a large variety of different tests, others screen a large number of samples for a limited number of parameters. Tecan can design the platform to accommodate the customer’s required throughput and flexibility.”

Sample preparation is a critical point in every assay procedure, but especially for food analysis. With such a wide variety of samples, some food samples are not easy to pipette. “While sample preparation can be as simple as sample distribution to a new tube or plate format, it can also include various extraction techniques to enrich or extract the analyte required for further downstream analysis,” Marg- Haufe says.

“Reducing manual interaction and bias adds to a more robust and reproducible result. The more steps that can be automated, the higher the reproducibility.” Other advant – ages to full process automation include extended walkaway times, improving employee efficiency as they are free to carry on with other work. “Transferring sample preparation and assay steps to an automated liquid handling platform also allows larger facilities and companies to share common procedures between different subsidiaries and depart – ments, greatly reducing the training effort to implement the procedures with new employees at different facilities. Protocol transfer becomes very easy and straightforward, much cheaper in the long run,” Marg-Haufe explains.

“As a company, we’re proud to provide highly flexible and modular platforms which can be tailored to specific needs. We’re always looking for applications which benefit from automation. A recent example is the colony picking application with SciRobotics’ Pickolo™ module. Integrating it on the Freedom EVO® allows customers to automate common colony picking applications, such as library screens for microbes carrying genes with specific properties of interest, genetic engineering for identifying and attaining distinct trait genes in plants, sample preparations for microbiological identification with MS techniques or quality control of dairy and agricultural products by microbial counting.”

According to Marg-Haufe, the instrument is intuitive to work with and picks colonies according to the customer’s selection. As a result of the increased colony picking speed using Pickolo™, some of Tecan’s customers use their Freedom EVO® for other tasks in addition to colony picking to fully exploit its potential. The worktable can be changed by removing the backlight carrier to accommodate different modules, and different applications can be run alternatively. “As an example, a complete series of protocols such as cloning experiments with restriction and ligation, PCR-setup, sequencing preparation, colony picking, bacterial trans – formation, nucleic acid extraction, culture inoculation and agar plate preparation can all be done on the same Freedom EVO® workstation. It’s a prime example of Tecan’s concept of modular flexibility.”