Flow chemistry automation with Pumpy

Flow chemistry is pretty hot right now, check out anything by Steve Ley he does some cool stuff. Flow chemistry and microfluidics are really popular, they enable precision control over the spatial distribution of materials during continuous processes. This is useful when one wants to continuously combine materials such as in a chemical process ultimately yielding a higher throughput when compared to batch processing. Flow chemistry and microfluidics also enable the emulation of biological systems, replicating similar kinetics and shear flows at surfaces which are not necessarily possible in bulk processes.

Biochemistry from a coffee shop in Vienna

Just a flat white and some E. coli please

Making Autoprotocols more flexible

On my first attempt at translating an experimental protocol to the Autoprotocol format I got as far as creating a run on Transcriptic with the protocol which is awesome. The downside of that Autoprotocol though, was that the samples being used in the experiment were hardcoded into the python script, so any variation in experimental samples or parameters would have to be made in the python.

My first attempt at working with Autoprotocol

Recently I wrote about my first experience of running a simple experiment on Transcriptic’s cloud biology platform. It was a simple bacterial growth curve. The protocol for running this experiment was produced by interacting with a GUI to enter parameters and the actual knitty-gritty of liquid handling and spectroscopic measurements was already predefined.

Living the dream, robots running biological experiments in silicon valley AKA my first go on Transcriptic

So I thought I would write up my first experience using Transcriptic.