BioTrove, a privately held, biotechnology company focused on leveraging revolutionary micro- and nano-scale engineering solutions,
has carried out a study to demonstrate the effectiveness of its ‘Living Chip technology for ultra high throughput screening of genetic
diversity.
The Living Chip-25K is a high-throughput screening tool
that allows about 25,000 nanoliter-volume reactions to be initiated and monitored simultaneously.
One operator can perform as many as one million nanoliter-volume assays per day using a minimum of automation.
In the validation experiment, a mutagenized Bacillus library was screened by processing over 40 pairs of nanoplates for discovery of mutant strains with high protease expression.
Each nanoplate is a
high-density array of 24,576 isolated reaction containers in the same footprint as a standard microplate and each reaction container holds
35 nanoliters of fluid.
Cells from the library were loaded onto a nanoplate at a density such that there is on average one cell clone in each container.
A second nanoplate is loaded with a fluorescently-labeled substrate and stacked onto the cell colony plate
to initiate protease hydrolysis in each reaction container of the array in a simultaneous and massively parallel manner.
The stacked plates are imaged and the high activity mutants are robotically cherry-picked for further analysis.
Up to one million diversity assays can be performed by one scientist per day resulting in a tremendous increase in efficiency and productivity.
“We are very pleased with the outcome of this study as a validation of our technology for diversity discovery", says Dr. Tom Morrison, Director of Biomolecular Discovery.
Dr. Morrison added, "We plan to apply the technology to the discovery and optimization of high-value biomolecules such as antibodies, peptides and enzymes."

Comments
Post new comment