This week we caught up with Joe Liscouski, Executive Director at the Institute for Laboratory Automation (ILA) in MA, USA, to find out more about how the use of liquid handling has evolved over the last decade and to gain some insight into what we can expect next.

On November 14th there will be a post event lab tour, free for Lab-on-a-Chip Asia conference attendees. This will include visits to Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, Nanyang Technological University, and National University of Singapore.

In the run up to European Lab Automation 2013, we’ll be sharing some interesting news and insights around the event on our new blog - http://tinyurl.com/aafeu9f .
We’d be delighted if you’d like to comment on some of our blog posts, adding your own thoughts and generally become a valued part of the conversation!

Keynote talk to be delivered by Dr Hakim Djaballah, Director, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center 'Illuminating Cellular Pathways through Combining High Content Assays with the BDA Method: Too Much Hay and Very Few Needles in Random RNAi Screening Stacks' at the DDA: High-content Screening & Cell Based Assays conference track at ELA. For the full agenda, please view: http://bit.ly/YSUu0P

Dr Holger Becker, Chief Scientific Officer of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH, discusses the great potential of microfluidics in our latest blog entry – http://bit.ly/15HpwvN.
Dr Becker will also be running a training course on ‘Microfluidics from the Concept to a Product: Technologies, Applications and Commercialisation Strategies’ at ELA on June 5th http://bit.ly/13ovJPE

In this week's blog entry - http://bit.ly/15HpwvN - Dr Quail gives us some insight into the current advances being made in NGS, as well as some of the challenges still facing the optimisation of NGS pipelines.
Dr Quail will be speaking at ELA 2013 about the new NGS applications being developed at the Sanger Institute, as well as some of improvements his team are making to sequencing protocols.