Qube Falcon is ready to increase your lab efficiency

Qube Falcon has been released and with that a range of upgrades to continue help finding better drugs faster. Since Eagle, Qube has had adaptive protocols which enables cell-specific recording to obtain much tighter data. Now the adaptive protocols have been more now flexible to cover the whole range from 10-90 % activation/inactivation. The cell-specific result can also be applied to both recording segments and to holding potentials.

Falcon can run idle sweep. These are the sweeps between one compound period and the next and gives more homogenous stimulation frequency of the cells and consequently compound effects.

Qube has sophisticated mechanisms to compensate for series resistance, capacitance and leak and with Falcon, we have faster computers to calculate all these parameters in parallel for all 384 amplifiers in only a little more than 4 seconds. Previously it took almost 10 seconds. The improvement means you can e.g. run CiPA hERG protocols with parameter estimation between every sweep.

Qube is a high fidelity automated patch clamp instrument meant to run unattended, for example during the night, and therefore it can also automatically match the barcodes/compound lists your screen and add results and analyzed them automatically in projects.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information and both virtual and real-life demonstrations where you get to run the instrument yourself after just a few hours of introduction – that is namely all it takes to safely and error-free handling of an instrument from Sophion.

Adaptive protocols at work

Charles River has presented how Qube with adaptive protocols gets tighter data on their Nav1.x panel when testing state-dependent sodium channel blockers. The performance was as good as with standard protocols but with 384 individual protocols, the modulatory effects of local anaesthetics were detected more reliably. Please click here to see the poster.

SLAS 2020

You can meet us at SLAS 2020 from 27th to 29th January at the San Diego Convention Center.

From the Sophion team, you can meet our ion channels team Katherine Webster, President NA, Gus Fish, Sales Manager NA, Daniel Sauter, Application Scientist NA and Rasmus B Jacobsen, Application Development Manager.

Send us an email if you want to arrange a meeting with us or if you wish to have a demo on our high-throughput, automated patch clamp system, Qube 348 that we are showcasing.

Tuesday, 28 January

Poster presentation:

Title: Development of an Automated Patch Clamp Assay for recording STIM1/Orai1 – mediated currents using Qube 384

Presented by application scientist Daniel R Sauter

Time: 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM

Poster No.: 1287-C

Read more about SLAS2020 here.

High throughput screening on Nav1.1 using Qube

The voltage-gated sodium channel Na_V1.1 is highly expressed in fast spiking interneurons (FSIs), which are important for memory encoding and other cognitive functions. An impaired function of FSIs is associated with disorders like autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and others. Potentiators of Na_V1.1 have been shown to minimize cognitive dysfunction in transgenic mice with decreased levels of Na_V1.1 in parvalbumin-positive neurons and this target thus lend itself to therapeutic intervention. The challenge is to identify the molecule with the desired mode-of-action which inherently requires electrophysiology. In summary we show that Qube 384 provides:

• Success rates up to 97%
• Stable, unattended measurements over 7 hours
• Consistent current voltage relationship
• High reliability of detecting Na_V1.1 activators

For the full application report please see here.