PerkinElmer Life and Analytical Sciences of Boston has launched Piezorray, a new non-contact microarrayer. The instrument can pipette into and aspirate out of a number of standard plate formats and dispense to a variety of non-porous and 3D substrates, such as PerkinElmer’s Hydrogel, to create DNA or protein microarrays. It features software with a Windows XP-based graphical user interface similar to PerkinElmer’s SpotArray and ScanArray technologies. The instrument has four PiezoTip dispensers and a flexible deck layout that allows for one source-plate holder. It can print up to 25 slides or five 96-well plates. Options include a temperature manifold for the substrate and plate holders, helium sparging for degassing, an enclosure, and an additional camera.
Imaging Research of St. Catharines, Canada, a subsidiary of Amersham Biosciences, has released an evaluation edition of version 7.0 of its MCIC Analysis image analysis software, which can be downloaded from its website. The software contains functions specific for fluorescence analysis, quantitative and whole body autoradiography, gel and blot analysis, stereology measures, and a wide range of general purpose image analysis tools. The program accepts images via TIFF format.