Team:Sherbrooke/Description
Project Description
A lot of technology fields are growing at an incredible fast pace. Just think of transport electrification with Tesla’s Model S, further and further space travel such as ESA Rosetta space mission, or simply your newly released cell phone.For instance, biology is part of those fields that are evolving incrediblely fast. But, the automatisation of biology technics in research and robotisation in biology are not still developped enough nor it is affordable to most laboratory. In an era where everything is automated with robot almost as soon it is feasible, biology lab researchers are still working heart and soul, day and night, to perform repetitive and time consuming lab manipulations that could easily be done by a robot.
Genspace, a community biolab located in Brooklyn saw an opportunity with all this and created the robotic platform OpenTrons. This platform consist of a Cartesian Robot and a pipette holding tool that can hold different models of pipette such as single channel and multichannel pipettes. They are now working on their platform OpenTrons OT.One, which was successfully funded, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign.
Professor Sébastien Rodrigue, biologist at the University of Sherbrooke located in Quebec, Canada decided to acquire the beta version of the OpenTrons platform. He then proposed a project to the electrical and software engineering students to design and built additional modules to add functionality to the platform. We gratefully accepted this thrilling challenge and so the Biobot project officialy started.
The project will help him to bring lab manipulation to another level and to do so, an automated robotic platform with compatible auxiliary modules will be designed and built. This platform includes a Cartesian robot, a tool holding support and a pipetting module inspired and build from the OpenTrons beta platform, a gripper and a centrifuge. Auxiliary modules include an ingenious mix of magnetism control, temperature control and instrumentation. All of these parts and modules are explained in details in our Wiki’s Design page.
Furthermore, the BIOBOT platform will hopefully be able to perform a recombineering experiment in a totally automated fashion including steps like: cell culture, optical density follow up, cell wash and preparation, electroporation, recuperation and plating. To do so, a clean deletion system will be constructed using an inducible toxin and a double selectable marker (amilCP and KanR). Those markers will make the cells resistant to kanamycin and blue, a feature that could serve the robot to be eventually able to see which colonies are good. A second recombineering experiment could remove this casette without any scars through selection with toxin induction. The details about the parts used and the experiments are shown in Biologic Parts section