Pipettes and pipette tips have been designed in combination in order to prevent tips from leaking or falling off, as well as to ensure they are all perfectly aligned at all times.
ZIZERS, SWITZERLAND: INTEGRA Biosciences AG is making multichannel pipetting quicker and easier than ever before. The company's extensive range of manual and electronic handheld pipettes - combined with the revolutionary GripTips system - is helping take the 'pain' out of multichannel pipetting, boosting productivity and ensuring happy, healthy staff.
The difficulties associated with using handheld multichannel pipettes are familiar to every lab scientist; tips need ‘hammering’ on to ensure they are picked up, but this still doesn’t always ensure correct tip alignment or a good seal, potentially affecting assay results. Add to this the extra force required to eject eight, 12 or even 16 tips at a time and the pain of using multichannel pipettes becomes all too real.
INTEGRA's handheld multichannel pipettes and GripTip system have been developed to eliminate these issues, allowing tips to effortlessly snap onto the pipette and ensuring they are always firmly attached, perfectly aligned and easily ejected.
The use of microplates is now standard in most laboratories, making multichannel pipettes the perfect tools to increase productivity and reproducibility. Working with eight-, 12- or 16-channel pipettes dramatically reduces the number of pipetting steps compared to single channel pipetting. This efficiency gain is even more pronounced when using multichannel electronic pipettes offering multi dispensing, allowing multiple aliquots – of the same or different exact volumes – to be dispensed in a single pipetting cycle.
Multichannel pipettes have been on the market for a long time, but are notoriously intricate to use. Some of the great frustrations when working with multichannel pipettes are misaligned pipette tips, tips that leak or, worst case, tips that fall off, resulting in wasted reagents or work that has to be redone. These issues are due to the widespread use of unfavourable pipette tip and tip fitting designs that requires excessive force to load tips across all channels. To ensure a secure fit, each tip often has to be hand-tightened; this is both time-consuming and enhances the risk of contamination. In addition, jamming the tips onto the tip fittings can cause difficulties for tip ejection after use.
The solution
INTEGRA offers a wide range of multichannel pipettes, both manual and electronic, which do not suffer any of these adverse effects. Pipettes and pipette tips have been designed in combination in order to prevent tips from leaking or falling off, as well as to ensure they are all perfectly aligned at all times. When loading, INTEGRA GripTips snap on with an audible click and positive haptic feedback to ensure they are securely fitted. This means that no ‘hammering on’ is required, and tip can be easily ejected after use.
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