Making mixtures of different liquids, often referred to as mastermixes, is a common procedure in many protocols. This is usually carried out when many mixtures need to be prepared and they all have the same components, except for one or two. For example, when setting up a PCR plate, often a master mix containing buffer, polymerase, and primers is prepared, aliquoted to all reaction wells, and then the template DNA, which differs for each well, is added to each reaction mix.
Making mastermixes is usually desirable as it minimizes pipetting steps and time, and allows for more accurate pipetting as the volumes handled are larger; improving consistency across replicates and samples. When making a mixture there are several common parameters that you should consider:
What liquids would you like to mix?
In which order would you like to mix the liquids?
What is the composition of the mixture based on the initial liquids?
What would you like the final volume of the resulting mix to be?
How much extra volume would you like to prepare?
Would you like to defer the transfer(s) of any liquid(s) and/or use another execution mode?
This series of tutorials explains how to structure your workflows and configure the parameters within the Core Elements to achieve the various mixing behaviors. Synthace’s Cloud Platform will use the parameters you provide in the Make Mixtures element to calculate the liquid handling steps required to yield the desired set of mixtures.
Defining mixtures through a visual plate interface
In addition to defining mixtures through the element parameters interface, it is also possible to define mixtures using a visual, interactive drag-and-drop interface, known as plate-based mixtures.
To learn more about plate-based mixtures, take a look at the articles here: