Nutrigenomics and the high tech lab

As part of the nutrigenomics research, food compounds are added to cells to see how they respond. Very small amounts of food solutions are used, and it is difficult for humans to do this accurately thousands of times a day. They will now use a robot to do the pipetting.

Transcript

Dr Martin Philpott (Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland)

For the nutrigenomics, because we want to screen large amounts of compounds, and that some the reagents we are using are really expensive and we want to keep the volume sizes down to a minimum, we are moving to these, which are 384 well plates, which is a 24-by-16 array. You can fit about fifty microlitres at the maximum in here, but we can work in volumes as small as ten microlitres. And for that, and also given the sheer number of wells on a plate, human error is going to become a real problem. So that's why we’ll be moving to a robotic system.