Beckman Coulter Life Sciences and 10x Genomics partner to enable single cell workflow automation

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, a global leader in laboratory automation and innovation, and 10x Genomics, Inc., a leader in single cell and spatial biology, today announced a new partnership to expand automation solutions for single cell assay workflows.

As part of the agreement, 10x Genomics plans to develop dedicated Chromium Single Cell kits to be used on a Biomek i7 Automated Liquid Handler by Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. This customized application will automate 10x Genomics single cell library preparation at high quality and large scale, resulting in finished libraries ready for sequencing.

Single cell methods are increasingly relied on in oncology, immunology, neuroscience and more to help researchers unravel biology’s complexities and fuel new scientific discoveries. As higher scale studies demand broader solutions, automation of manual processes such as library preparation enables greater throughput. This partnership is expected to automate the workflow after the Chromium instrument run is complete, focusing initially on high-throughput library preparation, to deliver a streamlined and more efficient solution for labs processing dozens of single cell samples at one time.

“Every day at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences we strive to take manual workflow bottlenecks and break them down so that laboratories can achieve their research goals faster and without error-prone steps,” said Elsa Burgess, Vice President and General Manager of Biotech Workflow Solutions at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. “We are honored that 10x Genomics has put their trust in us to deliver a solution to their customers that automates their single cell assays, especially as a broader set of researchers utilize this method. This is the beginning of an exciting collaboration that can ultimately benefit researchers across a multitude of scientific fields.”

As researchers continue to use more and more samples for single cell analysis, they’re looking for new automation solutions to create high-quality libraries with high confidence and less hands-on time. We’ve already had customers successfully pilot this approach, and we’re excited to officially partner with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences to develop high-scale automation offerings to open up larger single cell studies.”

Ben Hindson, Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of 10x Genomics

As part of this partnership, 10x Genomics plans to develop a suite of automation-compatible consumables to enable high throughput sample processing with validated results.