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, SpaceX's project to recycle space rocket, or simply your newly released cell phone. For instance, biology is part of those fields that are evolving incredibly fast. But, the automation of biology technics in research and robotisation in biology are not still developed 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.
Professor Sébastien Rodrigue, biologist at the University of Sherbrooke located in Quebec, Canada, wanted to bring manipulations of biology lab to an upper level. He decided to propose a project to the electrical and software engineering students at the university to design and built an automatic robotic platform that could do so. Our group of student gratefully accepted this thrilling challenge and so the BIOBOT project officially 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 with pipettes and a gripper, a centrifuge and auxiliary modules that include an ingenious mix of magnetism control, temperature control and instrumentation. All of these 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 blue and resistant to kanamycin, a feature that could serve the robot to eventually be able to see which colonies are good. A second recombineering experiment could remove this cassette without any scars through counterselection with toxin induction. The details about the parts used and the experiments are shown in Biologic Parts section