The proprietary Hummingbird technology involves sipping of sample from a source plate using narrow-bore glass capillaries followed by dispensing with a pulse of air. Dispense volumes range from 25 nL to 1000 nL per transfer. The interchangeable cassette holds 96 or 384 replaceable capillaries in a format to fit a SBS microtiter plate. Hummingbird can be controlled via PC and easy to use software, or integrated with a larger system through an ActiveX interface. Hummingbird systems provide fast, highly parallel non contact dispensing and transfer of compounds for assay assembly. Hummingbird transfers compounds from master plates to daughter plates for screening. Hummingbird can also be used for reformatting compound libraries from low density (96/384), to high density (384/1536) plates.
Efficient automated washing of the capillary tips prevents carry-over contamination, and eliminates the need for costly disposable tips. The NEW Digilab HummingBird Plus adds plate-stacking automation for High Throughput Hummingbird processing.
