Automated Testing Protocols

The Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI), Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Germany, has established an automated method to extract nucleic acids from bird samples to be tested for avian influenza using a Tecan Freedom EVO 200 liquid handling workstation with the Macherey-Nagel Nucleospin Viral RNA kit. “We needed an automated system that could achieve fast and reliable RNA extraction for the analysis of a large amount of samples,” said Dr Markus Durban, postdoctoral research scientist responsible for establishing the robotic system at the FLI. “We were aiming for a fast but exact method with a maximum recovery of viral RNA, using our existing protocol provided by Macherey-Nagel. There is good compatibility between the Tecan workstation and the Macherey-Nagel kit so we quickly established a stable working protocol for RNA extraction and this set-up allows 96 samples to be extracted in parallel in one and a half hours.”