Italian meat production: from farm to fork, assisted by automation

 Scientists in the serology department at the Veronesi Group’s Laboratorio Tre Valli play a key role in monitoring the health of the Group’s livestock and ensuring the quality of the food produced. Laboratorio Tre Valli, like many laboratories, benefits from using automated liquid handling, relying on Tecan’s Freedom EVO^® platform for ELISA testing.

Introduction

The Laboratorio Tre Valli, based in San Martino Buon Albergo, Italy, is a part of the Veronesi Group, a well established family run business specializing in the production and sale of fresh and processed meat products, mainly poultry and pork. Founded in 1952, the Group has built on the success of the original business, opening its first animal feed factory in 1958, establishing Agricola Italiana Alimentare (AIA) 10 years later, and subsequently acquiring brands such as Negroni. 

Apollinare Veronesi, the founder of the Group, aimed to guarantee quality products for the consumer by closely monitoring the entire production chain. The Group’s ‘from farm to fork’ philosophy entails following the supply chain – beginning with the animal feed and farms, and progressing through to the final product – and actively monitoring every phase of the food production process. Veterinarians supervise the animal husbandry, with other experts in appropriate disciplines scrutinizing the feed production, breeding and slaughtering processes, supported by laboratories belonging to the Group. 

Monitoring the production process

For prophylaxis reasons, it is important that all livestock are screened for infectious diseases – even if they display no symptoms – to ensure that the animals are healthy and, if a problem should be detected, to enable swift action to be taken to prevent the disease spreading. To meet this demanding requirement, a team of veterinarians, biologists and technicians monitor the animal’s health from the moment they arrive at the farms from the European or US producers.

Tradition is combined with many years of experience with research and the application of new technologies, using sophisticated laboratory automation and analytical systems, to screen for a range of different diseases. This monitors the effectiveness of the vaccination program and ensures that livestock are free from infection, guaranteeing the high quality of Veronesi’s products. 

Laboratory automation

As technology has advanced, modern, automated liquid handling platforms have been developed, which have the capability to perform a range of functions that could previously only be achieved using slow, tedious manual processes. Over time, these automated workstations – once the preserve of big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies – have steadily evolved to meet the needs of a much wider range of scientists. Today, smaller, easy-to-use systems are readily available, and automation companies now produce platforms tailored to meet specific customer requirements. 

Laboratories increasingly depend on this automation to increase speed, accuracy, sample throughput and efficiency, and Laboratorio Tre Valli – the largest of the Group’s laboratories – is no exception to this. Veronesi has invested in one such platform – Tecan’s modular Freedom EVO workstation, customized with selected liquid handling arms, a storage system, microplate washer and microplate reader – to meet the demands of the laboratory’s serology department. 

Results in real time

The serology department at the laboratory receives samples for analysis from 1,400 poultry flocks, over 400 pig farms and also from cattle farms, screening them for more than 20 different diseases – such as Aujeszky’s disease and PRRS in pigs, Newcastle disease and Avian Influenza in poultry, and IBR and BVD in cattle – using ELISA techniques. Automation plays a key role in this screening process, and the laboratory now uses the Freedom EVO to manage all the various samples and ELISA plates necessary, enabling precise, reliable sample handling while simultaneously improving the laboratory workflow and sample throughput. 

Around half of the assays are prepared in house, and kits for the remaining assays are purchased from external suppliers. After sample preparation, which involves separating the serum from the blood cells, the technician simply needs to place the ELISA plate onto the Freedom EVO and start the run. Samples and 96-well plates are identified by barcodes, increasing sample security, and the entire process is controlled by the Freedom EVOware^® Plus software.

Choosing a liquid handling system

When looking for a liquid handling system to automate the laboratory’s ELISAs, price, compatibility and the performance of the individual modules were all vital considerations for the Laboratorio Tre Valli. Initially, Tecan visited the laboratory to discuss its specific needs, with laboratory staff subsequently visiting Tecan in Switzerland to see the Freedom EVO in operation and look at the various options available in more detail. The laboratory decided to invest in the Freedom EVO 200 liquid handling workstation, equipped with a Carousel™ for fast access storage, 8­channel Liquid Handling (LiHa), Robotic Manipulator (RoMa) and multichannel (MCA 96) arms, a Sunrise™ microplate absorbance reader and a 16­channel HydroFlex™ microplate washer. The combination of LiHa, RoMa and MCA 96 arms provides the laboratory with precise, reliable parallel pipetting and offers the ultimate flexibility; for example, eight channel pipetting can be performed using the LiHa – or 96 channels with the MCA 96 – while simultaneously preparing for subsequent processes by moving the next piece of labware using the RoMa arm. 

Tecan engineers installed the system, customized the Freedom EVOware Plus software to meet the laboratory’s requirements and provided on-site training, which ensured that scientists had all the knowledge necessary to operate the Freedom EVO platform effectively. In addition to tailoring the software for the laboratory’s particular analytical applications, the system was configured to interact with Laboratorio Tre Valli’s IBM AS/400 computer system, transmitting the data acquired directly to the server and enabling veterinarians and other staff to receive real time results.

Summary

Previously, the laboratory relied on an old liquid handling system which was used as a basic diluter, whereas the Freedom EVO platform has the advantage of being a fully integrated system with the capability to perform the complete analytical procedure. Designed to accommodate all the modules required for the eight different analyses that the laboratory performs in a day, the Freedom EVO workstation can be fully loaded with everything that is required for the entire day’s workload. On average, it takes 1 hour and 45 minutes to run one 96-well plate, and the laboratory can process up to 27 plates – around 2,500 samples – in a nine hour period. The system and the software solution are very user-friendly, making the analysis simple to perform. The Freedom EVO platform’s walkaway automation allows staff to perform the same range of analyses, while freeing up time for them to carry out other essential laboratory tasks, secure in the knowledge that the system will process the samples reliably, allowing Veronesi to fulfill the demands of its ‘farm to fork’ philosophy.