Institute Marie Curie

Institut Marie Curie utilising mLINE and eLINE pipettors for each step of the Affymetrix protocols

Institut Curie, Translational Research Department,
Affymetrix® Team

Researchers at Marie Curie Institut in France rely on Biohit pipettors when performing large-scale genomic and transcriptomic analyses

For over eighty years, true to the wishes of its founders Marie Curie and Claudius Regaud, the Curie Institute has been pursuing two connected goals in the fight against cancer: patient management and oncology research. In Paris and in Orsay, over 1,700 people currently work for the curie Institute's hospital and research center. Interdisciplinary cooperation between clinicians and scientists is at the heart of the Curie Institue's culture and know-how, aiming to make the very most recent progress in cancer research available to patients as quickly as possible.

Supporting the meeting of clinicians and researchers around innovating programs, on ultramodern technical platforms, the Translational Research Department (TRD) headed by Dr Jean Paul Thiery occupies an essential key position to ensure the fast passage of progress of research towards the patient, the passage from the concept to the medical practice.

The technical platforms headed by Dr Charles Decraene are organized in four main activities with dedicated tools and expertises such as global analysis, functional analysis, preclinical studies and data analysis.

The global analysis including large-scaled genomic and transcriptomic analysis is performed thanks to the GeneChip® technology provided by Affymetrix. The data obtained by hybridization of the GeneChip® arrays allows to characterize the genes and their expression in various physiological and pathological conditions. To perform ambitious projects including high number of biological samples analysed in the same time the TRD decides to optimize each step of the Affymetrix protocols in terms of aerosols generation, pipetting reliability, reproducibility, execution quickness, etc. Thereby, for all the pipetting steps, The TRD looked for easy to use, efficient and ergonomic devices.

Thus, for more than one year, the functional genomic platforms of the TRD use the mLINE and eLINE pipettors for each step of the Affymetrix protocols, comprising double-stranded DNA synthesis, RNA reverse transcription, genomic DNA digestion/ligation, PCR and preparation of the GeneChip® arrays. As part of this technology, the mLINE pipettors, which are easy to use, light and adaptable, offer a high efficiency regarding their pipetting speed and their accuracy. The volume set-up is rapid, the locking mechanism allows a perfect control and the well studied ergonomics of the Biohit pipettors ensure a very high comfort of use along the prolonged pipetting series. In addition, this device is fully autoclavable which prevents any risk of contamination, and represents a high evidence of security.