Move Liquids with Sound™

Introducing the Portrait^® 630 spotter— the latest award-winning innovation from Labcyte Inc., the experts in acoustic droplet ejection! The Portrait 630 spotter is a fully automated non-contact, nozzle-free acoustic droplet ejection system optimized to deposit MALDI matrix and other reagents onto tissue sections and other samples for precision MALDI imaging mass spectrometry. Precise and flexible spot-on-spot positioning and timing enable sequential reaction chemistry and improve crystal formation, yielding higher quality, more sensitive, and more reproducible mass spectra.

Fast, Flexible and Precise Reagent Spotting
The Portrait 630 reagent multi-spotter gives you control over your experiments. The system accommodates a wide range of reagent types, including MALDI matrix solutions, buffers, surfactants and more. With ADE there are no nozzles to clog, so you can use even the highest concentrations of crystallizing agents.

• Fast
  • One cycle of one droplet per spot takes less than two minutes
• Flexible
  • Accommodates both glass and metal targets in a variety of sizes from most of the major mass spectrometer vendors, as well as standard glass microscope slides.
  • A full-color CCD imaging system captures images of stained or unstained tissue so that you can indicate exactly where you want to apply reagents and matrix.
  • User-defined spotting patterns allow you to draw grids for whole tissue mapping, or scatter patterns to indicate individual spot locations for protein profiling.
  • User adjustable deposition volume, cycle repeats, droplet and cycle timing allow you to optimize the results for different tissue types and experiments, including in situ enzyme reactions, MALDI matrix deposition, and more. Create different biochemical conditions on different areas of the sample, or perform biochemical reactions by applying reagents sequentially to the same locations. Optimize experimental conditions in a single step.
    
• Superior positional precision
  • Allows drop-on-drop applications such as enzyme digest followed by MALDI matrix
  • Allows selective specification of target area that is not possible with spray methods
• No clogging, even at high matrix and solvent concentrations
  
• Better results

• Higher signal-to-noise ratio
• More detectable peaks
• Better reproducibility

Specifications

• Target sizes (metal or glass): 123x81 mm, 75x25 mm, 44-47 mm², 57 mm², 55x41 mm
  
• Droplet volume: 170 pL
  
• Droplet deposition rate: user-adjustable up to 200 droplets/sec
  
• Spotting speed: <2 min for 1 cycle of 1 droplet per spot over approximately 1 cm²
  
• Spot-on-spot positional precision: ±40 µm, ±20 µm with included software offset correction
  
• Imaging system: white light with full-color CCD camera, 80 or 20 µm pixel resolution, user-adjustable integration time
  
• File export format: CSV and XML

Related Material

• Acoustic Droplet Ejection Enables Precise Timing and Positioning for Deposition of Matrix to Optimize MALDI Tissue Imaging S. Pickett, P. Chaurand, R. Huang, R. Stearns, R. Ellson, R.M. Caprioli. 17th International Mass Spectrometry Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, Aug. 27 - Sept. 1, 2006. [This poster is formatted to print on 8.5x11" (A4) paper.]

• Labcyte Release Acoustic Sample Preparation Technique, DrugResearcher.com, March 5, 2007

• Automated Acoustic Matrix Deposition for MALDI Sample Preparation, Aerni HR, Cornett DS, and Caprioli R. Anal. Chem. 78:827 (2006)

• Portrait 630 Spotter Brochure 

• New Acoustic Droplet Ejection Platform Enables Spot-on-Spot Picoliter Reagent Deposition for MALDI Imaging Mass Spectrometry, Arraying and Other Applications, S. Pickett, B. Browning, L. Lee, G. Ma, W. McClintock, M. Miller, M. Mutz, W. Sagun, R. Stearns, R. Ellson, E. Heron, American Chemical Society Meeting, Boston, MA, August 2007