In academic laboratories and pharmaceutical research where repetitive tasks are common, RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) poses a significant risk to workers due to prolonged and repetitive movements. This can lead to debilitating consequences, affecting both individual well-being and the general productivity of a lab.
Ergonomic pipetting solutions (like liquid handling automation or lightweight, electronic pipettes) play a crucial role in mitigating this risk by minimizing strain on users’ hands, wrists, and arms during these recurring pipetting tasks. Through their lightweight construction, the elimination of needing to push down on a plunger and ergonomic design, Waters electronic pipettes aim to enhance user comfort, efficiency, and safety. Here’s some insight from a Postdoctoral Researcher at KU Leuven into just how profound an impact acquiring Waters electronic pipettes has had for his lab in the form of a Q&A session.
“My colleague went from doing no lab work at all to achieving the same throughput as years ago - It's almost as if the clock has turned back for her wrists.”
A: With oral microbiology, we’re very interested in what’s happening in the mouth.
And more specifically, we want to see what kinds of microbes healthy and unhealthy people have in their mouths in order to better
understand which are associated with which kinds of diseases. Then, we see if we can specifically target the ones that are associated
with diseased people while also benefitting the good ones so that we can restore the balance of the oral microbiome. The ultimate
goal being to have hopefully healthy and happy patients!
A: I write a lot, but I think I pipette even more each day! So pipetting is very routine, and I think many people will recognize that if you
do it a lot, you start feeling it and some evenings it’s harder to do something else. The things we need liquid handling for is when
bacteria are involved. And then, because we want to know what those bacteria are doing, we then further process them through
flow cytometry or extract their DNA to look at it through qPCR or sequencing. Those last two can be very intensive with repetitive
steps and a lot of pipetting. In sum, mostly dilutions, transfers and a lot of plate work which directly multiplies the pipetting steps
necessary and exponentially increases the workload and how (physically) tiresome it is indeed.
A: Yes. It’s a very hot topic to be very high throughput, right? But for us, yeah, OK, we can do it quickly and can work harder, but high
throughput wasn’t the main focus. It’s always nice to use a buzzword like high throughput, but something that I feel is overlooked
and sometimes underappreciated is what it does to people. We have a very essential part of our lab (a lab technician who has
pipetted for 25 years) and she had to stop with lab work entirely, purely because of repetitive strain injuries. She couldn’t eject tips
anymore, so her doctor recommended that she stop working entirely. She wasn’t even allowed to enter the lab because of the risk of
making her situation even worse, so we were looking for solutions and ways we could reduce that stress. How can we make an
essential part of our lab functional again? That’s why we looked at a bunch of different options like automation and also ease of use
potentially through better pipettes.
A: So indeed we were initially looking at using a robot and were looking for options that would be adapted throughout the whole lab,
not just in one area of the lab. But moving a whole automated setup would be difficult, but we are also quite a big university and
space is always limited. Even with the footprint of the Andrew+ being quite low, running around with a simple set of pipettes is
much easier for our needs. So we looked for pipettes and when we got them, the first thing we noticed immediately was just a
pipetting… It was so much more comfortable ejecting tips. So easy. It’s hard to put in words how much it changed our pipetting
experience. An anecdote I can give you is that machine is right there (points to Thermocycler): My colleague went from doing no lab
work at all to achieving the same throughput as years ago – It’s almost as if the clock has turned back for her wrists, so that was like
the craziest thing. But secondarily, when she’s not using the pipettes, I tend to steal them for myself and there are great functions
like the multi-dispense, but even just the comfort of using them saves so much strain. If you’re doing this (mimics pipetting motion)
for a few hours, the strain makes you work slower and you make more mistakes. If you don’t feel the strain, you can work harder and
quicker. Many of the things that took way longer before feel so much more comfortable and it’s more streamlined. Even with just
basic things like automatic tip injections and just the lightweight ergonomics of an electronic pipette… I was initially worried that
they would be slightly heavier, but absolutely not. They’re comfortable and a pleasure to work with.
A: I wish I could be more negative to give a more realistic vision of it, but we have no regrets on buying these from the very beginning.
There are a bunch of options that have some sort of learning curve to them. I use them more than our older colleagues, but just the
normal pipetting tasks are so much easier, so much more comfortable. The main issue that we had faced first is simply the
purchasing cost because it’s of course a little bit more expensive, right. But we do not regret our purchase because we did it to save
our colleague, to save myself and a lot of strain and injury. So it ended up paying off. If you want to get everything out of it, yes,
there is a learning curve, but if you just want to do the basic tasks, that alone is already a win with these.
A: I write a lot, but I think I pipette even more each day! So pipetting is very routine, and I think many people will recognize that if you
do it a lot, you start feeling it and some evenings it’s harder to do something else. The things we need liquid handling for is when
bacteria are involved. And then, because we want to know what those bacteria are doing, we then further process them through
flow cytometry or extract their DNA to look at it through qPCR or sequencing. Those last two can be very intensive with repetitive
steps and a lot of pipetting. In sum, mostly dilutions, transfers and a lot of plate work which directly multiplies the pipetting steps
necessary and exponentially increases the workload and how (physically) tiresome it is indeed.
The content of this page is reformatted from the Q&A session performed during the webinar linked above.
