A Conversation with the Authors of Automated Operation of Immiscible Filtration Assisted by Surface Tension (IFAST) Arrays for Streamlined Analyte Isolation - A JALA Podcast

Summary: The extraction of specific analytes from biological samples is a ubiquitous process spanning many areas within the life sciences.  Advances have enabled high-throughput analysis of these analytes, but analogous advances in analyte purification (sample preparation) have lagged behind, creating a potential processing bottleneck. Although some robotic sample preparation processes have been developed, they are typically automated versions of the traditional solid-phase extraction (SPE) process, which is inherently difficult to implement as a high-throughput system due to the large number of washing steps required. The authors address this by demonstrating the compatibility of a fundamentally different sample preparation technique, immiscible phase filtration, with high-throughput infrastructure.