Hamilton Company Partners with Illumina to Automate Process and Library Tracking

Interactive settings allow users to customize fully traceable runs and prepare libraries quicker

Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, Washington, D.C., (February 8, 2015) -
Hamilton Company - a leading provider in the design and manufacture of liquid handling, process measurement, robotics and storage solutions - has partnered with Illumina to automate a variety of Illumina, Inc, library preparation kits.

The Hamilton NGS STAR for Illumina Library Prep is a medium to high throughput system that runs Illumina-qualified protocols. Illumina-qualified means that Illumina’s analysis has shown the libraries prepared on the automated system perform comparably to those prepared manually. Hamilton recently achieved Illumina-qualified status for the TruSeq® RNA Access Library Preparation kit. The TruSeq RNA Access method allows for processing of both FFPE and non-FFPE samples within the same run. In addition to the already qualified TruSeq Total Stranded RNA and TruSeq Stranded mRNA Library Preparation kits, having RNA Access on the STAR makes for a complete menu of RNA sequencing library preparation for Illumina sequencers.

“Liquid-handling robots are important tools for labs seeking to increase throughput and consistency. Illumina’s library prep kits can be automated on most general purpose liquid handling robots, but method development can still be time consuming,” said Susan Lee, Director of Standard Solutions, Hamilton Robotics. “This partnership with Illumina allows us to use the NGS STAR for Illumina Library Prep with the Illumina-qualified protocols, which then allows users to begin preparing libraries very soon after system installation.”

Hamilton Company and Hamilton Storage Technologies will be exhibiting during the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, SLAS (Hamilton Company booth # 501), in Washington, D.C., February 7-11, 2015.