Automated Nucleic Acid Extraction for Avian Flu Testing

An automated method has been developed to extract nucleic acids from bird samples to be tested for avian flu.

The Freidrich-Loeffler-Institute (FLI) Federal Research Institute for Animal Health (Isle of Riems, Germany) has developed this new method of extracting nucleic acids from bird samples to be tested for avian influenza. The Tecan Freedom Evo 200 liquid handling workstation, a product of Tecan Deutschland GmbH, (Crailsheim, Germany), together with the Macherey-Nagel (Düren, Germany) NucleoSpin viral kit, provide a fast reliable method for maximum recovery of viral RNA.

Dr. Markus Durban, who is responsible for establishing the robotic system at FLI, said, "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.”

Dr. Bernd Hoffmann, senior scientist at FLI, explained: "We compared several automatic systems for the nucleic acid extraction and, based on these tests, we believe that the Tecan equipment is suitable for sensitive and robust extraction of nucleic acid with minimal cross-contamination.”

Tecan specializes in the development, production, and distribution of advanced automation solutions for pharmaceutical and academic research, diagnostics, food and veterinary research, as well as forensics. Tecan is a supplier of compound and sample storage, management, and logistics solutions. Tecan's clients are pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, university research departments, and diagnostic laboratories.



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