Plasmid DNA Purification

Fully Automated Plasmid DNA Purification

PhyNexus delivers the industry’s only fully-automated plasmid DNA purification solution for any scale. No more laboring all day over plasmid preps.  No more expensive, time consuming outsourcing. Maxi, Mega and Gigaprep scale can all be done using one instrument, the AutoPlasmid MMG by PhyNexus. HTP Miniprep scale can be done on most major 96-channel liquid handling instruments. For the flexibility of Mini or Midiprep scale at the bench top, PhyNexus offers the AutoPlasmid MEA 12-channel instrument.

Manual Purification Process Cannot Meet Demand

Plasmid DNA purification is a messy business. Purification methods must cope with significant cell debris and flocculants, wash through genomic DNA fragments and RNA, while retaining plasmid DNA, and produce plasmids pure enough for a variety of downstream applications. The difficulty of automating plasmid purification means the process remains a tedious and arduous manual job. That was sufficient when only micrograms of plasmids were required for transient transformation in bacterial cells, but advances in transient transfection – from better reagents to significantly improved mammalian cell lines – have driven demand for more and more plasmid DNA preps. Manual purification simply cannot keep up.

One result is that more and more labs are outsourcing plasmid purification, paying high prices and often waiting a week or more for turnaround while losing the chain of control of their plasmids. Alternatively, those few attempts to automate the plasmid purification process, such as, vacuum manifolds or black-box cartridge systems, often foul, clog, require manual intervention, or simply do not work.

A New Perspective – A New Solution

PhyNexus looked at the challenge of automating plasmid purification from a new perspective and turned an industry practice on its head. The industry practice starts by placing limits on the size and density of plasmid culture used, unless it overwhelms the narrow parameters of the method. Then it offers a yield from an already limiting starting point. But growing large, rich plasmid DNA samples is anything but limiting.  So PhyNexus encourages customers to grow and process large rich plasmid DNA samples that are ideal for automated processing. As a result, PhyNexus is changing the way researchers and scientists think about the plasmids they are producing and purifying: it’s no longer a question of plasmid yield from limited manual processes, it’s a question of plasmid mass from easy automated processes.

To introduce automation to plasmid purification, PhyNexus uses its patented proprietary PhyTip Columns and Dual Flow Chromatography to purify the plasmid DNA. The PhyTip Columns draw the sample up into the resin bed where the plasmids are captured, washed, and eluted. From the outset, the process has been designed to be very robust to accommodate a variety of culture media, yet precise enough to deliver high quality endotoxin free plasmids.