Introduction
A common trend observed in life science testing over the past several years has been the ever shrinking test volume. Increasing costs of chemical compounds and commonly used solvents has pushed high throughput screening labs towards lower working volumes, specifically in the nanoliter range. Another factor driving current testing in compound screening and drug discovery labs to the nanoliter volume range is the desire to directly dispense from the source plates versus serially diluted test plates, thereby avoiding compounding dilution errors and reducing consumable costs. At test volumes in the nanoliter range, concentrations of chemical compounds are often kept very high and used essentially undiluted. Nearly all of these types of assays are dosage-dependent, thus knowing the exact volume transferred is critical for data interpretation and confidence in the final assay results. Hence, the ability to controllably dispense “known” nanoliter aliquots of samples is desired, which can readily be achieved using Pin Tools.
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