The Planning and Establishment of a Sample Preparation Laboratory for Drug Discovery

Abstract

Nature has always been a productive source of new drugs. With the advent of HTS, it has now become possible to rapidly screen large sample collections. In addition to seeking greater diversity from natural products sources (microorganisms, plants, etc.), fractionation of the crude extracts prior to screening is becoming a more important part of our efforts. As sample preparation protocols become more involved, automation can help achieve and maintain a desired sample throughput. To address the needs of our screening program, two robotic systems were designed. The first system processes crude extracts all the way to 96-well plates, containing solutions suitable for screening in biological and biochemical assays. The system can dissolve crude extracts, fractionate them on SPE cartridges, dry and weigh each fraction, redissolve them to a known concentration, and prepare mother plates. The second system replicates mother plates into a number of daughter plates.