ARTEL’s New MVS® Enhancements Advance Liquid Delivery Quality Assurance for Automated Laboratories

To help laboratories improve quality in automated liquid delivery processes for high-throughput screening, compound management and other advanced applications, ARTEL announces enhancements to its MVS® (Multichannel Verification System).

Capable of rapid, accurate volume verifications of multichannel and automated liquid handlers, the MVS is the only system that produces traceable accuracy and precision measurements in one simple experiment. With new features to enhance flexibility and productivity, strengthen data integrity and minimize equipment downtime, the MVS can better meet the evolving needs of life science laboratories. These advances add to the system’s ability to verify liquid handlers with up to 384 channels using aqueous and non-aqueous solutions for volumes as small as 0.03 microliters.

Improved automation is one key enhancement to ARTEL’s MVS, which can now be employed to read microtiter plates in batches, bringing verification closer to a “walk away” process. This adds to the MVS’ existing capabilities of automatic calculation and documentation of volume accuracy and precision to reduce human error and streamline the verification process. The MVS’ rapid performance requires minimal instrument downtime, leading to greater productivity.

Because the MVS is based on ARTEL’s proprietary Ratiometric Photometry, which measures the absorbance of two dyes to verify volume, use of a photometric reader is integral to the system. By advancing the MVS to interface with a variety of readers, ARTEL allows laboratories to use their existing, qualified readers to minimize capital costs and facilitate validation.

The near instantaneous well-by-well and tip-by-tip data reporting capability of the MVS coupled with the new Heat Map feature allows users of liquid handlers to quickly see, and better understand, equipment performance patterns. Previously, channels were identified only as in or out of tolerance. The new visual representation uses color gradients to identify relative dispense trends across the plate. This allows users to easily identify variability in their liquid delivery processes and channels that are trending out of tolerance, providing for more precise troubleshooting.

To further enhance efficiency, the new MVS can verify volume dispensed into 384-well high-density plates from liquid-handling equipment with 1, 8, 12, 96 or 384 dispensing channels. This functionality is especially beneficial for compound management and screening, during which multiple types of liquid delivery equipment are often used to prepare mother (source) and daughter (clone) plates. With this new MVS capability, the volume verification process can mimic the actual laboratory process, strengthening data integrity.

“Progress and automation in today’s life science laboratories are impressive,” notes Kirby Pilcher, President, ARTEL. “ARTEL will continue to innovate so that our customers using breakthrough liquid-handling technologies have equally advanced quality assurance methods at their fingertips.”