Robotic high-throughput assay for isolating apoptosis-inducing genes.

The need to assign functions to genes will increase in upcoming years because of the accumulation of sequence information from various organisms. Here we present a genetic screen for the systematic functional analysis of genes in mammalian cells. The screen is based on high-throughput, transient transfections of individual cDNAs by a robotic system. This construction uses a moveable pipetting head with a novel 96-channel parallel tube-pump array and an integrated de-lidding device. Because of the robot design, the processing speed can reach 2,000 transfections/h. We demonstrate the suitability of the screen to isolate apoptosis-inducing genes as a first read-out. This is achieved in combination with co-transfected reporter plasmids to produce a novel and convenient assay for apoptosis induction.