INTEGRA Pipettes Streamline Liquid Handling Workflows

The National Agricultural Research and Development Institute (NARDI) in Fundulea, Romania, relies on electronic multichannel pipettes from INTEGRA Biosciences to streamline its liquid handling workflows. These pipettes help the institute’s phenotyping and genotyping laboratory to extract and analyze DNA from hundreds of samples each day as part of a scientific approach to tackle the current challenges in agriculture, such as climate change, land scarcity and a loss of biodiversity.

NARDI Fundulea is recognized as the main agricultural research center in Romania, and has developed over 400 cultivars of field crops – including sunflower, maize, wheat, durum wheat, barley and soybeans – in its breeding program. To support this work, the institute conducts a variety of genetic diversity and association studies for important agronomic traits, including disease resistance, heat and stress tolerance, drought yield and quality. The facility introduced its first VOYAGER adjustable tip spacing pipette to the laboratory in 2015, and the pipettes quickly became an integral part of laboratory workflows. Daniel Cristina, a researcher in the genotyping and phenotyping laboratory, explained: “We investigate many different genomic and phenotypic markers in crops that we harvest from local fields, and our results help our in-house breeders to create new plant varieties with desirable traits. This requires us to perform a large number of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays – as well as more specific types of genotyping experiments, such as competitive allele-specific PCR (KASP) assays – which involve many liquid handling steps. We therefore rely on our VOYAGER pipettes – with their unique, motorized tip spacing adjustment – to efficiently and simultaneously transfer multiple samples between different labware sizes and formats, including from tubes to plates.”

“We use the VOYAGER pipettes to perform both simple liquid handling steps and for dispensing and mixing nucleic acid samples. Decreasing the number of repetitive steps we must perform when pipetting reduces the likelihood of human error, while pipetting multiple samples at once improves our throughput and allows us to keep track of our samples more easily. Issues such as climate change aren’t going away, and we plan to expand our range of VOYAGER pipettes as we look to help the agricultural industry overcome these challenges in the future,” Daniel concluded.