Robotics

A part of the IAM Team activity is the development of automatization processes using the Tecan Freedom Evo robot owned by the laboratory. It is a labwares (microplates, tubs, tips, Petri dishes…) and liquids manipulator robot that can be programmed to reproduce very large-scale repetitive procedures. It also includes a Tecan Infinite F200 Pro microplate reader and chambers with controlled temperature and agitation.

The main difficulty with such robot is the edition of scripts in order to use it in various experiments. For example, we can create an ordered library of bacterial mutants generated by random insertion of transposons. The robot can fill microplates with culture medium, detect colonies in a Petri dish, pick and seed them into microplates, manage changes of Petri dishes and microplates. 

Robotic can also be used to develop phenotypic assays. The capacity of the robot, coupled to a readout test (microscopy, plate reading, biochemical test, etc.) and a data analysis system for hit detection constitutes the basis for the high throughput screening studies. 

Apart from projects related to mutant libraries, the robot can also be used when a very good repeatability of liquid distribution on very large sample quantities is required.