Switching to a pipetting robot is easier than ever!

SQWERTY’s first user: Grace Ryall¹

¹University of Bristol, School of Biochemistry

Background

Grace’s experience of pipetting boiled down to a lot of single-channel Gilson pipettes for Western blotting and Bradford assays. Grace Ryall is based out of the Biochemistry department at Bristol University studying for her PhD in “Phosphoregulation of Argonaute function in synaptic plasticity and memory”. 

Grace would use a multi-channel pipette but “sometimes they can be unreliable, for whatever reason one or two channels won’t fill properly. Then you’re like: what do I do with the sample now? You have to eject all the samples and try again.” This can be especially aggravating if you only have a small volume of that reagent available. All things considered it may not surprise you to know that the Gilson pipette was designed back in the 1970s. 

When Grace first started her PhD, she was pipetting every single day for six months and ended up with RSI. “It’s like tennis elbow, [pipetting is] like an exercise in and of itself.” Grace used to lean on the table with her elbow to pipette and was putting a lot of pressure on it. Grace also admits that she was probably holding the pipette wrong and needed to make sure her wrist was straight to avoid injury. “That’s all you can do“.

Grace commented that “Sometimes you can accidentally twist the volume adjuster if you’re doing lots of pipetting in a row. So your volume changes slightly each time“. This can result in quite a big difference in volume from beginning to end so Grace constantly checks this. Volume inaccuracy has huge consequences in protein quantification assays as protein concentration could end up varying across replicates. If these results unwittingly get published and “Reviewer 2 asks you to repeat those [western] blots“, you can’t because of that variance. That’s a big ‘eek’ if you want to be responsible to science.

What was learning SQWERTY like?

Grace admitted that in the beginning “it was a little bit daunting…Generally in academia we don’t have a lot of robots…and this is an actual robot that actually moves stuff around. The process was very very straightforward and easy to do because it was very intuitive to figure out how to use it…I don’t think you need an instruction manual really“. 

Grace’s advice: jump right into it. Start off really basic, like a protocol that transfers liquid from one container to another in one go, then build your way up from there, making it more complicated each time until you end with your intended application. “The more you use it, the easier it becomes to use. It doesn’t require a lot of in-depth knowledge to start using SQWERTY“.

The final verdict

“For starters, I think it would be 100% more reliable [than a manual pipette]. Not least because in practically every element of research that we do here. We try to automate in some way because, at the end of the day, you want to remove any element of human bias. Doing it yourself instead of a machine can lead to inaccuracies that are out of your control. Whilst I was using SQWERTY I could definitely imagine myself using it for certain protocols that I use such as Bradford assay, BCA assays and also PCRs. I could see it being far more accurate than I could hope to be.”

Grace’s favourite feature: the UV light.  “A pretty integral function that just increases the range of experiments you can potentially perform that obviously rely on sterility.” 

What surprised her most was SQWERTY’s versatility and ease of use, along with the added benefit of labs being able to control their pipette tip suppliers.

Grace especially loved the ability to specify the characteristics of the liquid being transferred to fine-tune the speed and accuracy. As a future enhancement, Grace even suggested adding a customisable jingle for when the door moves.

Grace yearns to bring automated liquid handling to her lab and discard the status quo of manual pipetting. SQWERTY is the simple solution to bring greater accuracy and precision to your pipetting. Easy access to automation is more affordable than ever, working with you to prove the next breakthrough discovery with more reliability than a German car.