Tecan and PhyNexus collaborate

Published: 29-Jul-2010

Firms work together to automate protein purification

Tecan, a Swiss supplier of laboratory instruments is working with US-based PhyNexus to develop standard processes for automating protein purification using PhyTip columns integrated onto a Freedom EVO liquid handling robot.

The Freedom EVO is equipped with a liquid handling arm and a MultiChannel arm, and controlled using specially adapted EVOware operating software.

The disposable PhyTip columns are available in 5 and 20µL resin bed sizes (200µL column size) and 10, 20, 40, and 80µL resin bed sizes (1000µL column size). In addition, 200 and 600µL gel filtration columns are available for buffer exchange, desalting and size exclusion chromatography. PhyTip columns are capable of purifying sample volumes of 20µL up to 25mL and can elute in volumes as low as 10µL.

The majority of PhyTip columns do not require additional hardware, the only exception being the gel filtration columns, which use a PhyNexus rack and are transported on the Freedom EVO platform by a robotic manipulator arm.

Kevin Moore, Tecan’s director of market and application management for biopharma, said: ‘We are very pleased to be working with PhyNexus to bring an automation solution to customers in the fast growing area of protein purification. This will increase Tecan’s offering to the bioprocessing community.’

Douglas Gjerde, ceo of PhyNexus, added: ‘PhyTip column technologies include affinity capture of biomolecules, ion exchange, desalting, normal phase sample preparation – virtually any chemistry is possible.

‘By using the PhyNexus pipette tip column with Tecan automation, all sample preparation can be done faster, with less sample and giving great results. Functional assays requiring pure protein, hybridoma screening, formulations, and quality control all benefit from this purification solution, eliminating bottlenecks and allowing for better decisions earlier in the discovery process.’

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