Ziath Acoustix adapter for Mohawk tube selector

Ziath has released an adapter kit that enables its Mohawk tube selector to quickly and easily pick and reformat tubes from Azenta Life Sciences’ Acoustix racks, used by the latest generation of Labcyte Echo acoustic liquid dispensers.

Acoustix is a small sample tube with a screw cap that has been widely adopted for storage of novel compounds in solution held in compound storage facilities. However, many automated tube selectors struggle to effectively handle these tubes due to their small size and the fact that they are locked into racks that are suspended upside down in the Labcyte Echo acoustic dispenser.

The Acoustix adapter for Mohawk reduces the effective height of the Mohawk tube selector lid by introducing a clear acrylic plate at a lower height, which prevents tubes from exiting the inverted rack. This should both simplify and improve the speed of tube picking.

In addition, as Acoustix tubes ‘lock’ into their racks, Ziath developed a ‘release plate’ that can quickly and easily unlock all 96 tubes in a rack, ready for picking. Using an Acoustix software plug-in, in combination with the adapter and release plate, fast and easy single tube cherry-picking and reformatting from racks with automatic confirmation of pick list integrity is now possible.

Designed to enable picking of frozen or thawed sample tubes from 96-position racks, the Mohawk semi-automated has been designed to work out of the box and needs no set-up or calibration. Instrument control is through the user-friendly software, which provides an intuitive interface for effortless operation. Tubes can be picked from a single rack, or a picklist can be set up to select tubes across multiple racks. Pick list operations are normally started from reading the 1D code on a rack placed onto the tube selector, but manual selection is also possible.