Multipette®/ Repeater® M4 Allows for Fast, Precise and Sterile Liquid Transfer in Cell Culture

Pipetting in cell culture needs the consideration of various factors. The most important ones are sterility, accuracy and precision. Liquid handling systems used in cell culture should assure sterile liquid transfer and accurate and precise pipetting results. Commonly air-cushion pipettes in combination with filter tips and pipet controllers in combination with serological pipets are used for liquid handling transfer in cell culture. This application note introduces a third pipetting system suitable for cell culture applications. These are positive displacement dispensers which offer the great advantage of complete aerosol prevention as the piston integrated in the tip of the positive displacement system hermetically seals the sample in the tip from the instrument and thus ensures that no contamination of the instrument or a cross-contamination between different samples will occur. 

In terms of accuracy and precision positive-displacement dispenser show equivalent results to those obtained with manual or electronic air-cushion pipettes and are obviously suitable for handling cells.

 In contrary, reproducibility of results will be affected when pipet controllers in combination with serological pipets are used. That highlights that pipet controllers and serological pipets have clearly to be kept for applications which do not require accuracy and precision e.g. transferring larger volumes of e.g. media out of flasks, dishes or roller bottles.