Hi Reader, what can help us to reduce over 90% of plastic waste - without switching to glass or changing processes?
Dispendix has found a way - especially in sensitive processes such as the cleanup of next-generation sequencing workflows.
They provided me with a deeper look into their solution through their sponsorship of this piece.
Therefore, let me explain a unique approach to reducing time and error rates that minimizes environmental impact.
Today's Lesson: Exploring Greener Workflows
How modern instrumentation reduces impacts and time
Number of the Day
Imagine your lab does next-generation sequencing. If it runs just five 96-well plates a day, you would need at least 1440 pipette tips for the cleanup. In larger institutions, where this likely represents the average workload, this adds up to over 13 kg of plastic waste per month from tips alone. Add about 15 tip boxes per day, and you end up with another 33 kg Cutting this to less than 1 kg while enhancing precision is what the G.PURE from Dispendixenables you to do. Let's see how that works.
1440
Effortlessly Making Workflows Greener
When I first heard of the G.PURE from Dispendix, I asked myself: how should a small instrument reduce plastic waste by >90%?
The simple answer: it doesn’t use pipette tips for the cleanup of nucleic acids in next-generation sequencing workflows.
Of note, the G.PURE comes with a dedicated tablet and very simple-to-use software that doesn't need any advanced training.
If you want to sequence DNA, you generally have to purify your sample – normally using beads.
That means you remove the supernatant, add beads, wait, remove supernatant, add ethanol, and remove it. Then, repeat this 1–3 times.
With at least 3 tips per well (per plate and per cycle), that adds up to at least 288 tips per plate. However, the number increases to 576 if you do 2 cycles or 864 with 3 cycles.
With 3 cycles and 5 plates per day, that is 129 600 tips per month!
Moreover, performing the cleaning cycle manually takes about 25 minutes!
I took this graphic from Dispendix. Shown is the average cleanup workflow—of course, labs differ in how many washing cycles and samples they use, affecting the time and tips involved.
The G.PURE only needs you to add your plate and release the DNA from the beads at the end.
That means it doesn’t need a single pipette tip and reduces the time to about 5 minutes!
How Does It Work?
After you insert your 96- or 384-well plate, the supernatant is removed via non-contact liquid evacuation.
In simple terms: you remove the liquid by centrifugation. This means there is no contamination risk, as radial forces move the liquid out of the well.
Watch the full demonstration video on this website.
The result is an extremely low residual volume of less than 0.1 µl.
Thereafter, the washing solution is added through a dispenser.
The trick: angled dispensing allows for gentler dispensing without ever touching the sample.
And finally, stronger magnets ensure minimal bead loss.
Beautiful simplicity. No risky steps or additional work for you, but clear savings:
Why It Makes Sense
The entire secret lies in the fact that centrifugation and dispensing don’t require plastic tips. That is it. But it matters.
Normally, you would use one tip per sample, per step, per washing cycle – in total often 2–8 tips per sample. Now, zero.
As we mentioned, you also cut time by a factor of 5–8x. That is about 1.5 hours per five plates - maybe even more since there are no pipetting errors no more!
Importantly, the G.PURE safeguards your sample. To prove this, single human and mouse cells were alternately sorted into a 384-well plate (row H empty) and then processed using Smart-seq3 for RNA extraction and cDNA library prep. Bead cleanup was performed with either a Bravo liquid handler or G.PURE. Sequencing reads were mapped to both genomes to assess cross-contamination (without masking conserved regions). Result: no detectable well-to-well contamination (personal communication, for other application notes, see here).
What is so great about this technology is that it is the perfect example of how smart instrumentation reduces impact without “threatening” us scientists.
It removes routine washing steps, allowing us to focus on what really counts – the science.
Edited by Patrick Penndorf Connection@ReAdvance.com Lutherstraße 159, 07743, Jena, Thuringia, Germany Data Protection & Impressum If you think we do a bad job: Unsubscribe
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