Scattering Microscopy: Label-Free Imaging Approaches

Acoustic liquid handlers have been available for more than a decade. They enable nanoliters of liquid to be accurately transferred from one well to another, without any risk of contamination or loss. The liquid handlers adapt to different fluid types and enable direct dilution of a liquid rather than serial dilution, which is prone to errors and cross-contamination. Over the past 15 years, acoustic liquid handlers have helped reduce experiment time, improved efficiency, and provided cleaner results in fields such as drug discovery and synthetic biology. However, there is room for improvement. The acoustic instrumentation can be noisy, and some machines require tricky maintenance. With its next generation of Echo® Liquid Handlers, Labcyte is addressing these concerns, as well as introducing newly developed acoustic sample tubes as an alternative to the standard well plates.

Autoantibody assays may have significant differences due to the heterogeneity of autoantibodies, including epitope specificity, isotype, and affinity/avidity.

Current liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) methods used to detect monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) in biological samples are focused on targeted tryptic peptide quantitation, which requires that the mAbs undergo tryptic digestion before analysis. The use of digestion complicates the workflow and can affect the results obtained. Therefore, there is an increasing interest to simplify the workflow, by developing improved methods which can detect the intact antibody or larger antibody fragments.

This field spans through most scientific disciplines, studying cell imaging, stem cells, cell physiology and structure, cell signaling, cell culture, and translational biology, and encompassing other scientific fields such as cancer biology, neuroscience, genetics, bioengineering and so much more. The free, two-day conference will bring together professors, post-docs, biologists and biomedical professionals from all over the world.