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A liquid handling robot is used in automation of chemical or biochemical laboratories. It is a robot that dispenses a selected quantity of reagent, samples or other liquid to a designated container.
The simplest version simply dispenses an allotted volume of liquid from a motorized pipette or syringe; more complicated machines can also manipulate the position of the dispensers and containers (often a Cartesian coordinate robot) and/or integrate additional laboratory devices, such as centrifuges, microplate readers, heat sealers, heater/shakers, bar code readers, spectrophotometric devices, storage devices and incubators.
More complex liquid handling workstations can perform multiple Laboratory Unit Operations such as sample transport, sample mixing, manipulation and incubation, as well as transporting vessels to/from other workstations.
They can range from a specialized bench-top 8-channel DNA PCR processing robot, to a customized-for-process automated liquid handling system, such as the TECAN Freedom EVO (shown on the right).
Liquid handling robots can be customized using different add-on modules such as centrifuges, PCR machines, colony pickers, shaking modules, heating modules and others.
Control software, either on a connected computer, or integrated into the system itself, allows the user to customize the liquid handling procedures and transfer volumes.
Several companies that provide automated liquid handling robots include but are not limited to: