Pipetting and liquid aspiration are core tasks in clinical diagnostics, biopharmaceutics and cell therapy.
In cell culture, removal of media from cell aggregates and scaffolds is a bottleneck that is difficult to automate and must often be done slowly and carefully to avoid disturbing or accidentally aspirating individual samples.
Our Ergaspira200 pipette aspirator combines a micropipette’s liquid handling precision with the speed of a vacuum aspirator to accelerate cell culture maintenance and processing. With fast yet delicate liquid aspiration, work fatigue and risks of repetitive strain injury (RSI) is greatly reduced
Imagine how your lab workflow would change if you could
Remove milliliters and microliters of supernatant in one step
Change media on your 3D scaffolds 5 times faster than you can with a micropipette
Attach and eject tips on your vacuum aspirator like you would with your micropipette
Remove supernatant from microtubes
The phrase: “Remove as much supernatant as possible” occurs in the majority of protocols for
cell thawing
cell replating
cell purification
magnetic cell labeling
immunoprecipitation
and more.
For supernatant volumes larger than 1 mL, “removing as much supernatant as possible” either requires repeated draws and blow outs with a micropipette or a switch from using an aspirator to a micropipette.
With the Ergaspira200, there is no need for changing tools or even changing finger position when transitioning from continuous aspiration to accurate drawing of the last microliters of supernatant.
With no tool change, consumption of glass pipettes and micropipette tips is drastically reduced.
Remove supernatant from centrifuge tubes
For handling centrifuge tubes or other liquid containers with a separate cap, it is good practice to avoid putting the cap onto to bench surface and instead holding the cap between the fingers.
Unscrewing the tube cap with the pipette hand and transferring the cap to the tube hand is muscle memory memory for most lab people and can be gracefully done due the range of finger motion possible while holding a micropipette.
Just by being the only aspirator with a finger hook, the Ergaspira200 addresses an important but overlooked step in the daily work flow of so many lab technicians.
Aspirate media from sensitive cell cultures
3-dimensional cell culture is now common in life science and are e.g. used for development of higher-fidelity cell culture models that provide more realistic screening of drug candidates than traditional ”flat” adherent cell culture. The challenge of maintaining these loosely adherent cells or 3D scaffolds isto remove spent media without accidentally aspirating the samplepartially or completely. Most then prefer to remove media with a micropipette and a lot of perseverance.
The Ergaspira200 pipette aspirator lets you reversibly draw up 200+100 µL of liquid into the tip – like you would do with a P200 micropipette. However, rather than moving the tip to the waste container and blow out tip content, a gentle push on the ejector button will empty the tip backwards and ready it for the next well.
Strenuous blowouts and sweeping arm motions are avoided while the eyes can remain on the well-plate.
Wash robust samples for microscopy
Termination of a cell culture experiment and subsequent preparation for e.g. microscopy typically require multiple incubation and washing steps. In this situation, the innovative pipetting function may not be necessary to remove wash buffers etc.
The Ergaspira200 still provides unrivalled in-handle suction strength modulation over 6 mm of travel on a thumb operated button. Tip attachment and ejection is much more intuitive than what is offered by conventional vacuum aspirators.
Anything we missed?
The Ergaspira200 stems from the minds of stem cell researchers which obviously shines through in the feature demonstration videos. If you or anyone in your lab would like to have demonstrated how the world’s first pipetting aspirator would fit into your research scenario, feel free to contact us on dang@ergasta.com.