Wendy’s focus on customers also makes her an excellent internal customer representative to Artel’s teams, where she provides input on product development to the R&D team and communicates any quality issues with Artel products and services to the operations team.

Through hiring, training and guiding her team, she nurtures productive, long-lasting customer relationships.

Her goal is to ensure that first-class service is provided by Artel’s customer-facing team, whether it’s directly interacting with customers or through her management of the team. Her background has given her hands-on knowledge of customers’ tests and assays, enabling her to understand their pain points since she has experienced them herself. Wendy puts her years of experience in the laboratory and her passion for helping people and problem solving to good use as Artel’s Technical Services Manager. New scaling and offset values were calculated and the instrument was retested with the new values to show an improved relative inaccuracy at each volume: -0.05%, -1.14% and 1.05%, respectively. The “as found” performance was (linearly) inaccurate: -27.85%, -14.68% and -9.6% respectively for the three volumes. In the example discussed, a pre-optimized arbitrary “universal” pipetting technique was employed to dispense 2, 5 and 8 µL (scaling and offset were 1 and 0, respectively). The focus of this application note is to show that pipetting accuracy can be improved by simply adjusting the linearly-based calibration factors within the technique by first knowing: (1) the scaling factor and offset volume employed within the technique for the volume transfer task and (2) the amount of volume transferred to the test vessel as measured with the Artel MVS.

In the optimization approach discussed here, however, the individual and unique liquid class variables within a technique are relatively unimportant to the optimization process. This application note discusses one approach for optimizing pipetting accuracy on a Beckman Coulter Biomek liquid handler using MVS measurement information. Pipetting accuracy can be improved in any number of ways, such as by adjusting individual liquid class variables (aspirate rates, dispense rates, air gaps, mix steps, etc.) and measuring transferred volume resulting after each successive adjustment.

Beckman coulter biomek