Full-Automated Thermal Cycler in Nucleic Acid Testing Workstation.

Abstract

Integrated automation in laboratory has recruited many traditional standalone devices provided by various vendors, however, because of semi-automatization or lack of standard control interfaces, current available devices are difficult to be integrated into workstation. This paper reported a full-automated thermal cycler system (AutoTCS) equipped with a typical 96-well thermo-cycler module, and especially with a well-designed sliding hot lid for polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which makes it very suitable for using in an automatic nucleic acid testing (NAT) workstation. By a PC software or the touch screen on AutoTCS with user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), the presented system can not only serve as a PCR module of a NAT workstation, but also can be treated as a single PCR system. Experiments have demonstrated that the AutoTCS achieved a temperature accuracy of ±0.1 °C, a heating rate of approximately 2.5 °C/sec, and cooling rate of approximately 1.6 °C/sec. The AutoTCS was tested with PLCE1 gene and hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA, and this had successfully achieved an excellent PCR performance.