Accurate, Fast and Facile Preparation of Compound Dilution Series by Digital Dispensing

The pipetting of serial dilution series is daily business in biomedical laboratories, be it for the determination of the effect of test compounds in biochemical or cellular assays, for finding optimal concentrations of substrates and co-factors in assay development and a for a wide range of enzymological studies, such as active site titrations or determinations of kinetic constants of slow binding and irreversible inhibitors. We would like to introduce a benchtop instrument, the HP D300 Digital Dispenser that reliably and rapidly dispenses small volumes of DMSO dissolved compounds directly into wells of microtiter plates in a contact-free manner directly from stock solutions. The device dispenses single droplets of only 13 picoliters, and larger volumes are digitally built by rapidly shooting multiple droplets into the same well, just like ink-jet printers shoot ink droplets on paper to print letters and words. The remarkably small volume that is transferred with a single shot allows the direct dispensing of stock solutions into assay plates, spanning a wide range of concentrations of the dispensed compound. It is possible to generate custom made dilution series of DMSO dissolved compounds rapidly, accurately, with minimized compound consumption and with minimal effort.