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890417_electronic_pipetting_lh

Electronic Pipetting –Time to Rise to The Challenge

Dr Ulrike Gast Lab Academy

Do you pipette difficult liquids like ethanol, glycerol or detergents with air-cushion pipettes? Then you should double-check your pipetting technique, if you want to get the best out of your pipetting. The smaller the volume, the more significant the error. As a professional you would use positive-displacement pipettes and dispensers. If an air-cushion pipette is your only option, you should at least know how to perform reverse pipetting. What not enough people know is that reverse pipetting challenging liquids is easier with electronic air-cushion pipettes, and will help achieve far higher precision and reproducibility!

Examples are easy to name: An ELISA with foaming BSA solution, DNA extraction with liquids dripping out of the tip, or the preparation of glycerol stocks with liquid sticking inside the pipette tip. For the accurate transfer of challenging liquids, a clear recommendation exists: Use a positive displacement system like the Multipette®/Repeater® . You do not have one at hand? Then you are probably using an air-cushion system: the pipette. Why not using the electronic one?

Electronic pipettes are more robust than you would think and offer a bunch of advantages in terms of precision (repeatability), ergonomics, or mode variety. So far, so good. But why choose the electronic pipette for challenging liquids? Because it offers convenience. Let’s check this out along with the example of transferring a foaming liquid.

Of course, there exist more challenging liquids than this one. The overview below outlines how to deal with the other ones. For more detailed information, please refer to “Pipetting Challenging Liquids.”

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