Pipette Tips For Single And Multichannel Pipette Systems

In the life sciences laboratory environment, there are few pieces of equipment which see more use than a multichannel pipette and along with it, pipette tips.

Of course, pipettes are common instruments in any laboratory or quality control department where the workload demands the frequent handling of small volume liquid samples. These instruments are extremely commonly used in the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food and beverage production and other industries as well as in clinical research applications.

The pipette is an instrument with a long history of use and an equally long history of continual advancement in design, ergonomics and usability; today's pipettes often feature digital controls which allow for the high precision measurement of extremely low volumes of liquids which is absolutely essential in the modern laboratory environment.

The Multichannel pipette is of course one of the biggest innovations in the design technologies behind these nearly ubiquitous instruments, permitting laboratory personnel to greatly increase throughput in the lab. Along with the pipettes themselves, pipette tips have come a long way, being better designed to provide a tighter seal and easier placement on as well as ejection from the instrument itself.

While many whose work does not take place in a laboratory environment may be familiar with pipetting only through the single channel variety of the instrument, perhaps during a cursory course on chemistry, those who have made lab work their career use a much wider variety of pipetting instruments.

Many laboratories deal with very high volumes of samples, requiring that many different samples can be tested simultaneously. This calls for sample trays which can accommodate a very large number of samples; and a multichannel pipette is of course the instrument of choice in these laboratories, saving untold amounts of time in a high throughput lab environment. Along with these instruments, a large number of pipette tips are gone through in a single day.

Since laboratory personnel must deal with installing and ejecting such a large number of tips from their pipetting instruments on a daily basis, the design of these tips is something which is continually in progress. Tips which require less force to install and eject save a great deal of time as well as wear and tear on the hands of laboratory workers, something which anyone who spends the bulk of their day pipetting can certainly appreciate.

The state of the art in multichannel pipette instruments as well as in the area of improved pipette tips is always being advanced in order to provide for more efficient, ergonomically improved and even more ecologically friendly solutions for the laboratory environment. One of the newer innovations in the field is biodegradable packaging for tips, an issue which many laboratory workers in the life sciences have long been concerned about; given the high volumes of tips they use, a great deal of attention has been paid to reducing the environmental impact of these laboratory items.

Innovations continue to be made in liquid handling instrument technologies for the lab; making the next generation of scientific and medical breakthroughs a little easier on the people who spend their days working with a multichannel pipette, pipette tips and other pipetting equipment.