Sample preparation apparatus and multi-well plate with PCR chip
AssigneeSiemens Healthcare Diagnostics Inc.
InventorsDaniel Chu, Alex Hofai Lee
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An apparatus, multi-well plate and method for automated cell lysis and nucleic acid purification and amplification. The plate includes a lysis well, at least one wash well, an elution well, and a PCR chip. The apparatus includes a vertically aligned rotor mixer comprising a magnetic tip and actuators for moving the rotor mixer in a vertical and horizontal directions, to transfer magnetic beads from well to well. The rotor mixer is used to vortex lysis mixtures, wherein the vortexing speed is sufficient to overcome the magnetic attraction between the beads and mixer tip and disperse the beads in solution, to collect nucleic acids such as DNA in an elution solution that is transferred to the PCR chip for amplification of target sequences.
Claims7
A sample lysis, nucleic acid extraction and amplification apparatus, comprising:
- (i) a base for retaining a multi-well plate, the multi-well plate comprising:
- a lysis well, at least one wash well, and an elution well;
- (ii) a vertically aligned rotor mixer comprising a rotor shaft having a magnetic tip disposed at an end thereof, said rotor shaft being driven by a rotor engine for creating a vortex in mixture including a biological sample when said rotor motor is inserted in one of the lysis well, the at least one wash well and the elution well;
- (iii) a rotor mixer vertical actuator configured to impart elevational movement of the rotor mixer to selectively insert or remove the rotor mixer magnetic tip from a well of the multi-well plate,
- (iv) a rotor mixer horizontal actuator configured to selectively impart horizontal movement of the rotor mixer between any two wells of the multi-well plate, and
- (v) a PCR heating block configured to heat one or more heat zones in a PCR chip.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.