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A customer who maintains an archival stock of various organisms and DNA clones in bacterial culture has the challenge of making these samples available to researchers worldwide. Stock plates are thawed and picked to produce sellable consolidated plates of interest. Their production environment previously handled much of this process manually or with the help of a single non-integrated Biomek® FX with a stacker carousel. Growing throughput demands consistent with their expanding business and custom clone preparation service have made further automation a necessity. To support this business, the Project Management Team in Beckman Coulter's North America Operations (NAO) provided a solution that enabled this customer the ability to execute unattended hit picking jobs consisting of hundreds of source plates and large-scale plate replication tasks including barcode labeling. The NAO Project Management team met with the customer in a sales call to discuss system configuration and review data handling needs. They determined that a SAGIAN™ Core System would be required to meet the goals of a job of this size. The long-term goal involves database-directed inquiring of replication and hit picking jobs. For the first phase, the team decided to have the jobs driven by text files. The team also discussed staging of components on system to meet current and expected budget availability. Diagrams were provided to customer to enable them to arrange for their own HEPA filtration unit to be built around the Core System. The Core System with Biomek FX and Microplate Hotel (MPH) directly integrated to Biomek FX is illustrated below. The system also includes four core carousels, a delidding station and a Print & Apply station. In the future, a sealer, piercer, and other hardware may be added. Hit picking on the Core System is difficult because SAMI® doesn't have the ability to make on-the-fly decisions about when to move plates around. Hit picking requires automatic moving of the destination plate and tips as necessary based on the order of source plates. For this reason the MPH was integrated directly to the FX. The MPH stores the destination plates and tips, and under control of the Biomek FX, feeds new ones as necessary; SAMI only handles moving source plates. This utilizes the Biomek software's ability to make decisions to supplement SAMI's scheduling ability. The SAMI method itself is very basic (see below). Some application-specific Biomek FX VB scripting was provided by NAO Project Management to produce a user interface allowing for the easy entry of required parameters for the run.
The four core carousels plus one MPH provide ample storage for the large replication and hit picking jobs. Delidding these culture plates is a requirement handled by the delidding station. They also use the system for applying barcode labels to plates; the core Print & Apply station provides this functionality. Biomek FX is a standard dual-hybrid system with disposable tips. For comments or questions about T3 Update, please contact David Daniels, Ph.D., editor.
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