I was wrong on the price- yes $300/per, but still, it was a lot of money when we had catastrophic crash several years ago (due to something going haywire- not a script or operator error). I know the nitonol tips are not fool-proof- they just seem a bit more forgiving than the ceramic tips.
As far as the length of time plates are on the deck, we have always used humidity chambers. We build them out of lexan. Also, though 100 nl can be dispensed accurately, we prefer to spend the protein and go for larger drops, since it is really nice to be able to harvest from the drop. Our home-built robot can dispense 20nl accurately (although it uses a lot of "recoverable" protein to do it)- and while pretty crystals form, you can't do much with them. We typically dispense larger drops on that machine as well. -- Lisa Nagy University of Alabama-Birmingham [EMAIL PROTECTED]
