Agilent TapeStation 2200?

[ECO]

Anyone tried one as a bioanalyzer replacement? 1-16 samples, vague but seems to load itself from strips or plates , can use partial chips. Not quite automatable/walk-away for a full plate, but a lot closer than the Bioanalyzer.

Would love to hear opinions or experiences (or better yet, data!)

Product page here: https://www.genomics.agilent.com/Gen...om&pageid=2617

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=N2DU_Udvvts

[Heisman]

We are acquiring one. Not entirely sure when but I'll definitely play with it when I get a chance. I really have no idea when, though. We did just place the order last week so maybe soon.

[winegard]

Anyone tried one as a bioanalyzer replacement? 1-16 samples, vague but seems to load itself from strips or plates , can use partial chips. Not quite automatable/walk-away for a full plate, but a lot closer than the Bioanalyzer.

Would love to hear opinions or experiences (or better yet, data!)

Product page here: https://www.genomics.agilent.com/Gen...om&pageid=2617

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=N2DU_Udvvts

I don't have any direct experience but have some colleagues that had a demo of it and loved it. Anyhow the take home is that it seems they will run a demo for you to judge for yourself (Which I plan to do very soon).

[mnkyboy]

We are demoing one soon will report back.

[LAH]

Would you mind sharing any information you get about the shelf life of the reagents and "tape"?

[MrGuy]

I demo'd one, seems fine. It's simpler to use than a bioanalyzer, so nothing special. My big issue is the pricing. I'm getting told it costs as follows:

List: 49,000 USD
Negotiated: 34,000 USD

From my sources I have the following:
List: 43,000 USD
Negotiated: 25-30,000 USD

What alternatives are there to the Agilent Bioanalyzer and Tape Station? They can't be the only game in town.

[winegard]

What alternatives are there to the Agilent Bioanalyzer and Tape Station? They can't be the only game in town.

There's the BioRad Experion.

[MrGuy]

Ok, so we have the following...

BioRad Experion
Shimadzu MultiNA
Qiagen Qiaxcel
Caliper Labchip

None of them seem to get down to the same level of sensitivity (2 or 3 orders of magnitude) as the Agilent equipment. Most of the alternatives seem to focus on PCR-gel replacement.

http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15098

[TonyBrooks]

We had a very quick play on the Shimadzu and were suitably impressed. It's no way near as sensitive as the Bioanalyser, but for QC steps where there is lots of material (>10ng/µL) it looks decent enough.
The best thing about it is you can load a 96 well plate of samples and walk away which is just what we need for high throughput protocols. A whole plate takes a few hours as there are four capillaries. It saves having to spend a day running Bioanalyser chips which is currently a big bottleneck for us (as well as being a bit soul destroying when needing to QC a few hundred samples). Each sample costs about 30p to run so it's also much cheaper.
Unfortunately, we're feeling the squeeze at the moment, otherwise we would have definitely considered buying one.

[QSU88]

We bought one. it's been used for a month, good for quick QC assessment, extension run gives more chance to run sample longer without using new sample.

[JakobHedegaard]

We are considering a LabchipGX (Caliper).
Anyone with experience running it in the lab? Good and bad issues?

[surfnturf]

Would look to the tape station if using less than 6 samples a day on a regular basis, but once a lane has been punctured the rest of the tape has limited half life, and the cost per sample is high with the tape and special tips for sample loading. Considering the fragment analyzer by advanced analytical since running 12+ samples a day and may ramp that up further. Plated based , CE with 12 or 96 cap setup, high sensitivity (50 pg/ul for pre NGS fragments), resolves fragments up to 20 kb, analyzes gDNA, and has low cost per sample. Writing it into a grant, hope to get one ASAP.

[Smriti]

Hi Surfnturf,

We have observed lot of variability in sizing for genomic DNA using AATI gDNA kit. They claim its only for checking intactness of DNA and not accurate sizing. Which kit do u guys use for sizing on AATI instrument. Lower bp kit seems to work better. But we are more worried for higher bps as NGS market is moving towards higher fragments.

Any suggestions?

[K.Hopkins]

We recently had a TapeStaion on demo and it is quicker to get running than the bioanalyzer. The problem we had is that the High Sensitivity kits only size up to 1000bp, above this and the data is out of reach, and it is not uncommon for our libraries to be round this figure.

We were told the gDNA kit would work on these libraries. Has anyone tried this kit? as I have a few concerns about the sensitivity of it.

[winegard]

We are considering a LabchipGX (Caliper).
Anyone with experience running it in the lab? Good and bad issues?

Hi Jakob,

We have a Caliper GXII but have not used it to it's full potential. It's actually quite a good machine - the one limitation of it (that caused us to stop using it for a while) is that it cannot handle gDNA. In fact, if there is gDNA in your sample at all, it will clog the sipper chip, so you have to remove gDNA before running samples which was our problem.

That being said - I'm considering bringing it out of retirement as we are now doing a lot of NGS work and it will be very handy for looking at our libraries etc...

Neil