Air Displacement Pipettors Empower a New Line of Microbiology Diagnostic Instruments

A French manufacturer of microbiology diagnostic instruments had incorporated Swiss-built air displaced pipette units in its new line of liquid handling systems.

Tecan (Männedorf, Switzerland), a leading global provider of laboratory instruments and solutions in biopharmaceuticals, forensics and clinical diagnostics recently announced that the French microbiological instrument manufacturer i2a (Montpellier, France) would be incorporating its Cavro Air Displacement Pipettor (ADP) into PRELUD, an automated preanalytical instrument for the inoculation of culture plates and preparation of agar susceptibility tests.


The Cavro ADP is a fully programmable pneumatic pipetting module that uses air rather than liquid displacement to aspirate and dispense fluids. The slender design allows the Cavro ADP to be mounted in automated applications with narrow 18 mm spacing between devices. The Cavro ADP is compatible with Tecan’s high quality disposable tips (DiTis) for situations where washing tips between samples is ineffective or impractical.

“We needed something very light and easy to use, and that was capable of pipetting liquid volumes ranging from microliters to milliliters,” said Michel Roch, i2a's PRELUD project manager. “The Cavro ADP was easy to integrate because it operates mechanically without the use of liquids, and it allows precision liquid dispensing. The tip ejector was another highly useful function; we use Tecan’s disposable tips and simply change between 10 microliter, 200 microliter and 1 milliliter tips according to our needs. We were able to integrate the Cavro ADP into PRELUD very quickly and, within two days, we could handle liquids. The reproducibility, precision, and accuracy of the Cavro ADP are good enough for our microbiology application without the need for any further tests or trials. We are very satisfied with our collaboration with Tecan.”

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