CN112206843A

CN112206843A - Device for transferring liquid

Info

Publication number: CN112206843A
Application number: CN201910629123.4A
Authority: CN
Inventors: 林继伟; 王洪琦
Original assignee: Huada Qinglan Biotechnology Wuxi Co ltd
Current assignee: Huada Qinglan Biotechnology Wuxi Co ltd
Priority date: 2019-07-12
Filing date: 2019-07-12
Publication date: 2021-01-12

Abstract

The invention relates to a liquid transfer device, which consists of two layers of slide rails, a plurality of movable pipetting units and a structural unit, wherein the two layers of slide rails consist of an upper layer of slide rails and a lower layer of slide rails, the upper layer of slide rails and the lower layer of slide rails can integrally move up and down relatively, the slide rails consist of a plurality of long cylinders which are arranged in parallel at equal intervals, the movable pipetting units are modules which can independently complete the functions of liquid suction and liquid drainage, the upper half parts of the movable pipetting units are contacted with the upper layer of slide rails, the lower half parts of the movable pipetting units are contacted with the lower layer of slide rails, the upper part and the lower part of the movable pipetting units can slide along the track direction of the two layers of slide rails simultaneously, when the upper layer of slide rails moves up and down relatively, the upper half parts and the lower half parts of the movable pipetting units can be driven to move up and down relatively, thereby realizing the purpose of gathering or mixing the adjacent or non-adjacent samples in parallel.

Description

Device for transferring liquid

Technical Field

The invention relates to a liquid transfer device, in particular to a device which transfers liquid in parallel and can adjust the relative position of the liquid.

Background

In biological experiments, transfer and mixing of various samples may be involved. These operations are typically performed by single or multi-channel pipettors. When the number of samples is small and the types of the samples are many, the operation can be quickly and flexibly completed by using the single-channel pipette; when the number of samples is large and the variety is single, some operations can save time by using a multi-channel pipettor to pipette in parallel.

The spacing between channels of a multi-channel pipette is fixed, and when the relative distance between samples before and after transfer needs to be changed, the multi-channel pipette cannot be flexibly strained.

Many high throughput sample manipulations are currently performed on 96-well containers, 384-well containers, or 768-well containers. Often, one encounters samples in the same row, some of which require transfer, while others do not. Multi-channel pipettes do not work efficiently in this respect, while single-channel pipettes work very much. The spacing between channels of some pipetting stations is variable, allowing selective parallel pipetting of the sample to be transferred, followed by readjustment of the distance between the channels. Equivalent to the parallel single channel that carries on mutual independence moves liquid the operation, can effectively improve work efficiency. However, the pipetting workstation is expensive in equipment and complicated in operation steps, and the application range of the pipetting workstation is limited.

Disclosure of Invention

The invention provides a device for parallelly transferring liquid and adjusting the relative position of the liquid. The two-layer slide rail constitute by upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail, upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail can whole relative up-and-down motion, the slide rail comprises the rectangular cylinder of many equidistant parallel arrangements. The movable liquid-transferring unit is a module capable of independently finishing liquid-absorbing and liquid-discharging functions, the upper half part of the movable liquid-transferring unit is in contact with the upper sliding rail, the lower half part of the movable liquid-transferring unit is in contact with the lower sliding rail, the upper part and the lower part of the movable liquid-transferring unit can slide in the rail direction of the two layers of sliding rails together, and when the upper sliding rail moves up and down relative to the lower sliding rail, the upper half part and the lower half part of the movable liquid-transferring unit can be driven to move up and. The movable pipetting unit can slide along a slide rail, and the change of the relative position between samples during liquid suction and liquid discharge can be realized, thereby realizing the purpose of mixing adjacent or nonadjacent samples in parallel.

In some embodiments, the elongated cylinder is a straight metal tube or rod having a length of 14 to 30 cm, preferably 24 cm; the diameter is 3 to 5 mm, preferably 3.8 mm.

In some embodiments, the equidistant parallel arrangement means that the elongated cylinders are aligned and parallel at two ends, and the distance between the cylinders is 9 mm.

In some embodiments, the movable pipetting unit has recesses in the shape of half cylinders on both sides of the upper and lower halves, the diameter of the half cylinders being the same as or slightly larger than the diameter of the elongated cylinders, so that when the movable pipetting unit is placed between two parallel elongated cylinders, the movable pipetting unit can only move in two directions along the central axis of the elongated cylinders due to the shape fit, but cannot move in other directions. The upper half part of the movable pipetting unit is called a piston, the lower half part of the movable pipetting unit is called a stator, and the stator comprises a pipette tip.

In some embodiments, the piston has a lower surface to which a cylinder perpendicular to the lower surface is fixed, referred to as a piston cylinder.

In some embodiments, the stator comprises a pipette tip, a tip cap, a rubber ring, and a base, wherein the inner surface of the tip cap matches the outer surface of the pipette tip, and the tip of the pipette tip extends from the lower opening of the tip cap. The thick end of the pipette tip is contacted with the rubber ring. The rubber ring is contacted with the base. The suction head sleeve is connected with the base through threads. The piston column is inserted into the inner hole of the rubber ring, and the diameter of the inner hole of the rubber ring is the same as that of the piston column. Through adjusting the elasticity of screw thread, can extrude the rubber ring, adjust the leakproofness of each contact surface, adjust the contact leakproofness of rubber ring and piston post simultaneously. The two side surfaces of the base are provided with semi-cylindrical concaves which can slide on the slide rails.

In some embodiments, the piston and the stator may move together when the piston is toggled.

The liquid-transfering device of the invention can flexibly adjust the relative position of each sample in the same line, selectively absorb the samples in the high-flux container in parallel, and carry out operations such as folding or rearranging. The operation is simple and efficient, and the maintenance is very easy.

Drawings

The present invention will become more fully understood from the detailed description and the accompanying drawings, wherein:

fig. 1 is a schematic view of a slide rail.

Fig. 2 is a schematic cross-sectional view of a piston and stator.

FIG. 3 is a cross-sectional view of the position of the movable pipetting unit and the two-tier slide.

Fig. 4 shows a schematic view of the sliding of the movable pipetting unit along the track.

FIG. 5 shows a schematic of the pooling of 96 PCR samples.

Detailed Description

In one embodiment, a parallel device for transferring liquid and adjusting the relative position of the liquid is provided, as shown in fig. 1, each of the upper slide rail and the lower slide rail is composed of a plurality of 9 elongated cylinders which are equally spaced and parallel to each other, the spacing between the elongated cylinders is 9 mm (the spacing between the elongated cylinders refers to the distance between the axes of two adjacent elongated cylinders), and both ends of the elongated cylinders are fixed on the fixing frame. The rectangular cylinder of upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail is parallel and aligns at the vertical direction, and the mount of upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail also aligns at the vertical direction, and upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail can be relative motion in the vertical direction.

Each elongated cylinder is a stainless steel tube 24 cm long, 3.8 mm in outside diameter, and 2.8 mm in inside diameter.

The double-layer slide rail has 9 rows of long cylinders, 8 rows of movable pipetting units can be placed in the double-layer slide rail, and 12 movable pipetting units can be placed in each row. When less than 12 movable pipetting units are used in a row during operation, the unused movable pipetting units can be moved to the left or right (where left and right refer to the ends of the elongated column, respectively) without affecting the operation in a 96-well plate or a 384-well plate.

Referring to fig. 2, the movable pipetting unit consists of a piston and a stator. The stator consists of a 10-microliter pipette standard suction head, a suction head sleeve matched with the suction head, a rubber ring and a base, wherein the rubber ring is a silica gel O ring with the outer diameter of 5 mm and the inner diameter of 1 mm. The suction head cover is hollow structure, the surface has the screw thread, the most advanced of pipettor suction head stretches out but can not deviate from the lower part of suction head cover, the rubber ring is located pipettor suction head butt plane, the base is the cuboid, there is vertical through-hole inside, be used for inserting the piston post, the base lower part has round cylinder sunkenly all around the through-hole, it can match the screw thread of screwing up with suction head cover surface screw thread to have in sunken, screw-thread fit through suction head cover and base makes pipettor suction head and rubber ring fix on the base. The lower part of the piston is fixed with a stainless steel needle which is 35 mm long and 1 mm thick, namely a piston column. The steel needle stretches into the stator from the through-hole on the base and inserts in the rubber ring, and the rubber ring contacts with base and pipettor suction head butt, forms sealedly on the contact surface of steel needle and rubber ring, forms sealedly on the contact surface of rubber ring and pipettor suction head butt and on the contact surface of rubber ring and base, reciprocates together through steel needle drive stator.

The position of the movable pipetting units on the slide is shown in fig. 3, in which fig. 3 2 movable pipetting units are shown. The upper portion side of the base of stator and the side of piston all have the indent of semicylinder shape, and the diameter of semicylinder matches with rectangular cylindrical diameter for when the activity is moved liquid the unit and is placed between two parallel rectangular cylinders, because the agreeing with of shape, the activity move liquid the unit can only be followed rectangular cylindrical center pin direction two-way removal, and can't carry out the removal of other directions. When the movable pipetting unit is installed on the slide rail, the semi-cylindrical indent on the side surface of the stator base is in contact fit with the long-strip cylinder of the lower slide rail, and the semi-cylindrical indent on the side surface of the piston is in contact fit with the long-strip cylinder of the upper slide rail. The interior recess of the half-cylinder shape of adjacent base forms the drum, and the rectangular cylinder of lower floor's slide rail passes this drum, and the interior recess of the half-cylinder shape of adjacent piston forms the drum, and the rectangular cylinder of upper slide rail passes this drum to make the activity move the liquid unit and can move about along upper slide rail and lower floor's slide rail.

As shown in FIG. 4, the sliding direction of the movable pipetting units is along the central axis of the long column, and FIG. 4 shows 3 movable pipetting units which can slide freely along the track under manual poking. The width of the movable pipetting units in the direction of the track is 9 mm (i.e. the width of the base and the piston in the direction of the track) so that after all said movable pipetting units are aligned, pipetting and discharging can be performed directly from the 96 well plate.

The upper sliding rail can integrally move up and down by 11 mm to drive all the pistons on the device to move up and down, and can parallelly and maximally take and discharge 8 microliters of liquid.

When pipetting is performed using the above pipetting device, as shown in fig. 5, 96 PCR samples are present in a 96-well plate, with 12 samples in each row for 8 rows, some of which are not required and all required samples need to be brought together to the left in each row.

a) Each small circle in fig. 5 represents a PCR sample, wherein the darkened small circles represent unwanted samples.

b) There are a total of 96 active pipetting units in the apparatus.

i. Firstly, initializing the movable pipetting units, namely aligning all the movable pipetting units to the left, so that when one movable pipetting unit is dialed, all the movable pipetting units in the same row on the right side of the movable pipetting unit move together;

in the first row, the fifth movable pipetting unit is dialled to the right by 18 mm;

in the second row, the seventh movable pipetting unit is dialled to the right by 9 mm;

in the third row, the sixth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm, and then the ninth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm;

v. in the fourth row, skip;

in the fifth row, the ninth active pipetting unit is dialled to the right by 9 mm;

in the sixth row, the eighth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm;

in the seventh row, the eighth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm, and the eleventh movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 18 mm;

in the eighth row, the fifth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm, and then the twelfth movable pipetting unit is shifted to the right by 9 mm;

x. press the upper slide and insert the device into the 96-well PCR plate on the left in fig. 5, with the tips of all tips inserted below the sample level. Lifting the upper sliding rail to complete liquid suction;

shifting all movable pipetting units on the device to the left, namely, left alignment;

move the device to another 96-well PCR plate and insert. And the upper slide rail is pressed down. The liquid is discharged, so that the gathering of the sample is realized;

parallel mixing between adjacent samples can be achieved if the above steps are repeated, but moved 9 mm to the left or right when moving to another 96-well PCR plate.

The embodiments of the present invention are not limited to the above-described examples, and various changes and modifications in form and detail may be made by those skilled in the art without departing from the spirit and scope of the present invention, and these are considered to fall within the scope of the present invention.

Claims

1. An apparatus for transferring a liquid, comprising: the device consists of two layers of sliding rails, a plurality of movable pipetting units and a structural unit; the two layers of slide rails consist of an upper layer slide rail and a lower layer slide rail, the upper layer slide rail and the lower layer slide rail can integrally move up and down relatively, and the upper layer slide rail and the lower layer slide rail respectively consist of a plurality of strip cylinders which are arranged in parallel at equal intervals; the movable liquid transfer unit is a module capable of independently completing liquid suction and liquid discharge functions, the upper half part of the movable liquid transfer unit is provided with a piston and is in contact with the upper sliding rail, the lower half part of the movable liquid transfer unit is provided with a stator containing a liquid transfer pipette suction head and is in contact with the lower sliding rail, the piston and the stator can slide along the rail direction of the two layers of sliding rails together, and when the piston is shifted, the stator can be driven to move together; when the upper slide rail moves up and down relative to the lower slide rail, the piston and the stator of the movable pipetting unit can be driven to move up and down relatively, so that liquid suction and liquid discharge are realized.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the elongated cylinders are straight metal tubes or rods having a length of 14-30 cm, preferably 24 cm; the diameter is 3 to 5 mm, preferably 3.8 mm.

3. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the equally spaced parallel arrangement is an aligned parallel arrangement of the two ends of the elongated cylinders, the cylinders being spaced 9 mm apart.

4. The apparatus according to claim 1, wherein both sides of the piston and the stator of said movable pipetting unit are recessed in the shape of half cylinders having a diameter the same as or slightly larger than the diameter of said elongated cylinder, so that when the movable pipetting unit is placed between two parallel elongated cylinders, said movable pipetting unit can move only in two directions along the central axis of said elongated cylinder, but not in other directions.

5. The device of claim 4, wherein the lower surface of the piston is fixed with a cylindrical piston post perpendicular to the lower surface.

6. The device of claim 5, wherein the stator comprises a pipette tip, a tip cap, a rubber ring and a base, the inner surface of the tip cap matches with the outer surface of the pipette tip, the tip of the pipette tip extends out of the lower opening of the tip cap, the thick end of the pipette tip contacts with the rubber ring, the rubber ring contacts with the base, the tip cap and the base are screwed together by screw threads, the piston column is inserted into the inner hole of the rubber ring, the inner hole of the rubber ring has the same diameter as the piston column, and the two sides of the base have the concave part of the semi-cylinder and can slide on the slide rail.