Lab Automation Insights in Sample Preparation for LC/MS Analysis

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Copyright: © 2014 Rogatsky E. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This week in San Diego, USA the Society for Lab Automation and Screening (SLAS) annual meeting and expo is taking place. This conference features 132 word class podium presentations and 400 poster presentations attracting experts from industry and academia, students, engineers and business leaders from around the World. This is only the third annual meeting, representing a relatively young and rapidly growing and developing field of automation for different laboratory workflows and processes, which is steadily replacing semi-automatic or manual methods. Initially, the complete automation of manufacturing processes was achieved in industry for various production lines. Next, automation has brought benefits to sterile environments, e.g. vaccine production and blood banks in order to minimize employee exposure to biological hazards, minimizing human error, and ensuring product purity and integrity. The next breakthrough of automation was in routine laboratory operations, such as immunoassays, crystallography, DNA screening/sequencing, cell culture and stem cells assays. Automation of immunoassays has allowed multiplexing (multiple parallel assays) using single source serum samples significantly speeding up analysis while enhancing sample integrity by eliminating multiple freeze thaw cycles, and/or reducing sample requirements by reformatting from a single source sample. ELISA and other plate based immunoassay are the most frequently used assays in clinical diagnostics. They allow fast, relatively specific and sensitive assays of many analytes or metabolites. A workflow bottleneck for immunoassays is a typical incubation time of several hours, that makes the processing throughput of manual processing relatively slow only a few plates per day per lab technician. Automation of plate based assays, which has matured over the past few years has increased the productivity of clinical laboratories, decreased operational costs, minimized (human) errors, while enhancing workplace safety for laboratory personnel.