Screening Unit

Giuseppina Giardina
Unit Coordinator
[email protected] | |
Telephone | +390294375000 |
Location | Building 13 Floor 1st Via Adamello 16, Milano |
The Screening Unit (SU) aims to provide open access for academic projects towards experiments in medium-throughput fashion. The Screening Unit serves for systematic, plate-based screenings of cellular and biochemical assays, with collections of chemical libraries with state-of-the-art equipment.
The mission of the Screening Unit is to:
- Provide screening collections of compound libraries.
- Identify bioactive compounds capable of modulating cellular functions.
- Miniaturize test volumes to reduce costs for expensive reagents.
The SU staff provides general steps of medium-throughput screening:
- Preparation of cells and compounds libraries.
- Small scale test with positive and negative controls to test Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO tolerance) on a given target cell.
- Pilot screen with a small number of already used compounds to test different readouts, positional effects of plates and systematic liquid handling errors.
- Configuration and programming of the Tecan Freedom evo robot.
- Data acquisition and handling from automatic plate reader.
- Validation of identified effective compounds.
- Access to the unit to carry out screens upon appropriate training.
- Problem solving.
The SU hosts an open access technology platform of:
- Tecan Freedom evo robot.
- Automatic plate readers (Infinite 200 Tecan, GLOMAX Explorer Promega and PHERAstar BMG LABTECH).