Collect plasmids — fast, easy and consistently — with BioPACIFIC MIP at UCLA Automated System
High-throughput miniprep for high-purity plasmid DNA now available to users at the BioPACIFIC MIP’s Living Biofoundry
Extracting circular plasmid DNA strands from microbes is an indispensable early step for investigations across fields in the life sciences and biotechnology. The task feeds studies in molecular and synthetic biology, chemical and biological engineering, regenerative medicine, and drug discovery and development.
The ability to quickly isolate high-quality plasmids with minimal labor gives researchers the advantages of speed and efficiency as well as the chance to focus their efforts on exploration and invention. This capacity is now available at the BioPACIFIC MIP housed at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA for academic users or researchers based in industry.
An automated system that conducts high-throughput E. coli minipreps for high-purity plasmid DNA was recently brought online at the Living Biofoundry, a resource of the BioPACIFIC MIP, an NSF-supported collaboration between CNSI nodes at UCSB and UCLA. The platform includes a colony picker, shaking incubator, centrifuge, vacuum filtration system and plate reader. Hundreds of minipreps can be collected in just a few hours, with a workflow that requires little human intervention while offering consistent, reproducible results.
“The instrumentation and expertise at the Living Biofoundry made it simple for my lab team to successfully amplify and purify near 300 plasmids from bacteria,” said Yi Tang, a UCLA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a co-principal investigator of the BioPACIFIC MIP. “Their technology checks all the boxes for scalability, efficiency and versatility.”
The user-friendly, customizable platform conducts as many as 96 minipreps simultaneously. It can process plasmids as large as 26,000 base pairs while yielding concentrations up to 10 micrograms per plasmid. The system is also notable for its flexibility: It works with bacteria, mammalian cells and certain fungi, including a range of yeasts, as well as performing custom DNA purifications.
The facility’s Thermo Scientific GFPickolo processes up to 800 colonies per hour, with options for selecting colonies based on circularity, size, color, shape or isolation distance. The device is compatible with a variety of plate types and can be used with stem cell colonies, mammalian cell clones and hybridoma clones. The system also incorporates a Thermo Scientific Cytomat 2 automated incubator — a dedicated 96-well microplate and deepwell incubator and shaker with a range from 10°C above ambient temperature to 50°C.
Inquiries about the miniprep system can be directed to Michael (Mike) Lake, technical director of the Living Biofoundry, at mlake@cnsi.ucla.edu; or Ikechukwu (Ike) Okorafor, associate project scientist at the Living Biofoundry, at iokorafor@cnsi.ucla.edu; or to biopacificmip@cnsi.ucla.edu.
