FDSS 7000

The Hamamatsu FDSS is a kinetic plate imager — and that distinction is the whole point of the instrument. Rather than scanning wells one after another, it images the entire microplate at once and can inject into all wells simultaneously, so there is no time lag between wells.

For the assays it is built for — GPCR and ion channel work, where the response is fast and transient — that removes the read-order artefact a scanning reader introduces.

At a glance

Measurement	Whole-microplate imaging, fluorescence and luminescence
Injection	Simultaneous to all wells
Plate formats	384-well systems, upgradable to 1536-well
Dispense volume (1536 tip unit)	0.5 µL to 5 µL
Dispense precision (1536 tip unit)	Lower than 10% CV between wells
Revolution control	Start, continue, abort, retry and cancel an assay, per plate location

Specifications

Hamamatsu publishes the following additional detail for the FDSS 7000EX.

Instrument type	Kinetic plate imager for fluorescence / luminescence assays
Applications	GPCR and ion channel drug discovery
Dispensing heads	Two 1536 tip heads, or a combination of tip and pin

The upgrade path from 384 to 1536 is worth knowing when specifying: the format is not fixed at purchase, and the dispensing configuration — two tip heads, or tip plus pin — determines which dispense protocols are available.

Supported methods

Every operation takes a plate location number, because the instrument is addressed per location rather than as a single nest:

• Start assay — begin the assay at a given location
• Continue assay — resume an assay at a location
• Abort assay — abandon the assay at a location
• Retry — retry at a location
• Cancel — cancel at a location

That per-location addressing is the part to get right in a schedule. An operation sent to the wrong location number acts on the wrong plate, and nothing in the call itself will reveal the mistake — so the mapping between schedule positions and instrument location numbers needs to be recorded and verified, not assumed.

The presence of both retry and continue is also worth noting: they are different recoveries. Continue resumes an assay that is paused or holding; retry re-attempts one that failed.

Integration

Prerequisites

• The instrument must be reachable from the Revolution host.
• The assay protocols the schedule starts must already be defined in Hamamatsu’s own software.
• The dispensing heads fitted must suit the dispense protocol the assay needs.
• Location numbers must be confirmed against the physical instrument before a method depends on them.

If you need more of this instrument driven from a schedule, get in touch — the driver is extended on demand.