Trimming the Tedium

Zymark Corporation's automated Prelude™ Workstation reduces sample preparation time.

Automated sample preparation provides numerous advantages for today's busy laboratory. Researchers currently face an increased pace of new product development, stricter quality control, and more testing requirements imposed by federal government regulations. The Prelude Personal Productivity Workstation from Zymark Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., is designed to help researchers meet these increasingly stringent demands. The latest in a series of laboratory workstations, the Prelude is particularly suited to the labor-restricted lab with a large sample load.

The Prelude automates a variety of sample preparation procedures, including dilution, weighing, mixing, filtration, and extraction. An internal balance monitors each step of the process to provide a detailed report of the steps taken, in compliance with 21 CFR Part 11. The data are automatically documented and logged into a secure database. This information can be used by laboratory information systems, chromatography data packages, and...