All the scientists when asked whether they use some kind of lab automation answer – “Of course” but recently a survey conducted by Lab Equipment showed that nearly 35% of the respondents do not use any lab automation systems. However that is still a large number of respondents who do use the lab equipment.
Among the equipment that they use for automation, 66% of the users chose the pipette as the dispensing device, which means the market for these devices is enormous. The biologists were the users of automation most frequently (21%) followed by physical chemists(19%), and chemists(13%).
Here are the top uses of automation technology in biology.
19% ELISA
18% Cell based assays
13% DNA or RNA purification
8% PCR reactions
5% ADME Toxicity assays
4% Next –Gen sequencing
3% Cytokine assays
2% MALDI spotting.
These numbers reflect on two things:
- The assays those are very easy to automate
- The most frequently used assays
There is a good market for assays and probably the ADME Toxicity assays can be automated easily when combined with cell based assays.
