Week 3.5 - Remote Lab Automation

Remote Lab Automation

As a bright side to doing my Master's in times of the pandemic. I will be remotely programming an OpenTrons robot! The OpenTrons OT-2 is a robot used for automating experiments. Usually, experiments are carried out in 96 well plates where a person will be mixing and mashing a bunch of fluids with a manual pipet. While the process can be beautiful and helpful to leanr, automation allows for faster experimentation at greater scales. A neww component to the automation of this process is using such a platform as an education tool. The HTGAA is pioneering the use of automation robots for remote learning of synthetic biology! Its quite exciting to be a testing student for this!
The image below shows the robot that we will be using for this first test. The challenge for this week is just to create a nice pixel art using food dyes.


For the assignment, I decided to create the City Science logo in the 96-well pixel plate. I only used one color but wanted to test put using loops and arrays in order to iterate through multiple repeated steps with the robot. Loops work as expected. Only problem that I encountered was when I did a mistake in the number of iterations, when there is a python error, the robot will stop on the last command it excecuted. This mistake is relevant because if you are doing a large lab automation, you would have to waste a lot of liquids and restart the project if it happened. For this time my solution was just to drop the tip and continue with my loops so it was ok. Below (left) is a video of my whole session. Most of the time was spent iterating through the commands and drilling down into understanding the basics. The second video is an edited version that only shows segments of the robot in active operation.

And here is my final result! Everyhting turned out ok! I think I have leanred enough to optimize the paths and to use the least amount of pipets as possible. I am looking forward to trying the robot out with actual bio materials. That should be great!!