For my final project, I am thinking about building a “replica plating” device for mammalian cells.
For certain high-throughput experiments, cells are grown in 96 well plates.
Each well is a separate experimental condition so a 96 well plate has 96 different conditions or cell types. One problem with this setup is that it is hard to split these cells into another 96 well plate, which you often want to do.
I would like to build a device that can do this mechanically, avoiding the need to pipet. This would be particularly useful for adherent cells.
For bacteria or yeast, an analogous procedure can be done, called replica plating.
In the diagram below, the device is in green. It is basically a set of 96 small coverslips upon which the cells could grow, but connected to all of the other cover slips (illustrated here for 2 wells).
The idea would be to lift the connected coverslips and place them in a new 96 well plate, effectively making a copy of the original 96 well plate.
I could potentially make the project even cooler by having a setup with a motor that raises the device from one 96 well plate and automatically places it into a new 96 well plate.
Such a device would be very useful for biological projects involving single cell sorting. This technique is often part of genome engineering projects where the goal is to select a cell with the correct mutation from a population where most cells don not have the correct mutation.