Beckman Coulter Life Sciences Written by Keynote Contributor, Crystal Girod, Senior Product Manager at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. Proteomics is the area of research that studies protein expression, interactions, function, structure, and post-translational modifications.
The nature of these laborious, manual tasks presents opportunities for error. When technicians must handle hundreds of samples a day, errors often arise no matter how engaged or well-trained they are, wasting time and money. Given the risk of error in these workflows and the hands-on time required, the throughput of a single individual is limited in scalability as demand increases manually.
Laboratories that are short-staffed also will not have the resources to train new, inexperienced hires, which can further degrade the reliability of the results. Simply put, there are insufficient trained personnel to keep up with the sample preparation experiments to sustain the growing demand for proteomics.
Automation: alleviating bottlenecks In response to these aforementioned challenges, automation has been brought to the forefront as the solution to manual sample preparation, staffing, and standardization issues. Automation has clear benefits—it takes over the many manual activities of lab personnel, minimizing the opportunities for user-derived errors as well as sample-to-sample variation.