Applications

mosquito‘s ability to miniaturise assays or protein crystallography set-ups allows smaller volumes of precious sample to be used with no risk of cross-contamination, resulting in savings on expensive reagents.

Protein crystallography

mosquito makes protein crystallography screening faster, more cost-effective and quite simply easier than ever before. mosquito Crystal automates high density 96-well hanging drop plate preparation, as well as sitting drop, microbatch and seeding or additive screening, with no need to make setup changes to the instrument.

mosquito’s accuracy and repeatability means drops are placed centrally in the sub-wells of sitting-drop plates, minimising problems with drops being distorted by the well walls or drops not coinciding. Precise drop placement facilitates automated analysis, as the area of interest can be much smaller, thus making crystals easier to identify.

mosquito Crystal can create several multi-component drops per well, even in 96-well hanging drop set-ups. This allows different samples, constructs, complexes, volume ratios or protein concentrations to be assessed at the same time. mosquito is unique in its ability to perform multiple aspirations before a single dispense, which is essential to automating additive screening. A combination of solutions can be dispensed simultaneously – with additional mixing if required – resulting in perfect drop formation with no protein evaporation.

Screening

mosquito HTS is widely used for the preparation of “assay ready” plates containing test compounds prepared from library stocks or dilution plates, as its disposable micropipettes guarantee zero carry-over between samples. The pipettes are strong enough to pierce the seal on single use 384-format “mini-tubes” as they enter them, and reach to the bottom of mini-tubes or V-bottom wells, thus optimizing the volumes retrieved. mosquito HTS can replicate mother plates into multiple low volume daughter plates, or reformat from 96-well plates into 384, or from 384 into 1536.

mosquito HTS performs serial dilutions across an assay plate – but in miniaturised volumes ranging from 25-1200nL. The micropipettes address each column of a 96, 384 or 1536 plate at a time with an aspirate, dispense and mix cycle, which aspirates close to the bottom of the well and dispenses near the top of the liquid level to enhance the mixing process. These capabilities have allowed users to effectively perform hit-confirmation, specificity, cytotoxicity and p450 assays at multiple compound concentrations.

Hit Picking

mosquito is also available in a single tip "hit picking" version, which offers precision sampling of any individual well or location, for example on a glass slide or coverslip. It is primarily used for selecting hits from primary screening plates and transferring them directly to the next screening stage without further dilution.

mosquito X1 is a single tip "hit picking" version of the highly successful mosquito system, offering precision sampling of any individual well or location, for example on a glass coverslip. It uses the same technology and disposable micropipettes as the standard mosquito.

mosquito X1 can pipette accurately and reproducibly throughout the 25nL-1200nL range.

Applications for the mosquito X1 include:

• selecting hits from primary screening plates and transferring them directly to the next screening stage without further dilution
• evaluating the scale-up potential of protein crystallography screening hits by dispensing multiple drops, or adding nanolitre volumes of additives to individual drops
• miniaturising assays by pipetting very low volumes
• using the multidispense option, mosquito X1 can dispense into multiple wells - or wells within multiple plates - from a single aspiration, thus increasing speed and saving on consumables for sample replicates

mosquito X1 can address most plate formats including 48, 96, 384 and 1536. It offers the same high level pipetting performance and accuracy as the standard mosquito. Its extremely flexible plate deck can move in any X,Y direction allowing the disposable pipettes to aspirate accurate low volumes from any individual well - even piercing aluminium or PET plate seals.

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Genotyping

PCR is expensive. mosquito can reduce the reagent cost of real-time PCR and SNP genotyping by up to 90% simply by miniaturising the assay, while mosquito's disposable micropipettes have the added benefit of eliminating cross-contamination.