This application is to request funding support for the purchase of an Automatic Liquid Handling System, TekBench-SP from TekCel, which will be used to support our scale-up efforts in high-throughput screening of small molecules at the new chemical screening facility at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM). This screening facility as a part of the newly established Chemical Biology Center is created to meet the growing needs of a large number of MSSM's investigators to access and discover new chemical agents to be used as research probes to study cellular pathways and networks and the function of cellular components in health and disease. This new robotic instrument replaces our current Gilson's 215 single-probe liquid handler/injector that we have used in our pilot projects of chemical screening. The new instrument offers a fully integrated and automatic liquid handling platform, and makes it possible for automatic processing of various sample processing applications required for chemical screening, which include chemical library reformatting, ELISA, kinetic and cell-based assays, as well as cherry/hit picking. Thus, this new instrument will greatly facilitate many ongoing NIH funded investigators at Mount Sinai who are committed to employ the powerful chemical biology approach with small molecules to mechanistic investigation of a wide range of biological systems.
