Built in the ‘biggest little city in the world’, the Microlab® Prep™ liquid handler from Hamilton Robotics in Reno, Nevada, is the smallest automatic liquid handler in their arsenal. Half the size and nearly a third of the weight compared to their other automatic liquid handlers. Hamilton say they designed the Microlab® Prep™ liquid handler as an entry-level for labs moving away from manual pipetting of 96 and 384 microplates and sample vessel prep work to a more hands-free environment.

Manually pipetting this number of wells can cause repetitive injury problems, so this hands-free solution only requires the operator to set it up on the software, which Hamilton say a person of “any skill level” can operate. The instrument has a deck capacity of 8 SLAS/ANSI positions and has a “dynamic” pipetting range of 0.5µL to 1000µl.

Hamilton Robotics: “In addition to the standard configuration consisting of two independent pipetting channels, the Microlab Prep is available with a high-speed multi-probe head, as well as a configuration containing both pipetting technology types for the utmost in flexibility and speed. When used with Hamilton’s wide range of pipette tips, patented Compressed O-Ring Expansion (CO-RE^®) technology creates a tight seal for superior measurement accuracy and precision without tip distortion or aerosol generation during tip pick-up and ejection. Optional CO-RE paddles provide automatic sample vessel transport around the Microlab Prep deck to optional peripherals, such as the Hamilton. Additionally, a mounted camera detects and identifies labware to facilitate protocol programming and verify labware type and placement. The intuitive touchscreen interface facilitates rapid recall of pre-programmed pipetting or maintenance protocols, and also enables users to create, simulate, and save custom liquid handling protocols. The interface also displays pertinent information during pipetting protocol runs, including time remaining, current actions, and remaining steps”.  

Hamilton Robotics are well known to be one of the dominant players in the ‘Automated Liquid Handlers market’ and have previously collaborated with other medical device companies to deliver improved products to laboratories. In the last decade Hamilton Robotics have worked with; Waters Corporation on the STARworks  biopharmaceutical sample prep system; Illumina  on their Next-generation sequencing (NGS) workstations; Qiagen’s QuantiFeron-TB Gold Plus diagnostic test; Peak Robotics and their KiNEDx robot series on Hamilton’s Microlab star and Roche and New England Biolabs on their NGS workstation. As of last year Hamilton Robotics are now merged with their parent company Hamilton.