INF319 Project - Exploring the possibilites of utilizing an Opentrons pipette robot for faster and more accurate sample preparation.

A project at the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen

Biologists today spend a lot of their time on pipetting and performing sample preparation by hand, which can be tedious and time-consuming work. In order to alleviate some of this work, the Proteomics Unit at UiB has therefore recently acquired an open source Opentrons robot. This is a programmable robot which can be made to do many different routines in terms of lab work, thus automating parts of experiments which otherwise have to be done by hand, and as a result make the sample preparation process both more accurate and take much less time.

Setting up such a pipeline as mentioned above requires more than just basic programming knowledge, including getting the robot up and running and implementing basic protocols for it. The goal of the project is to set up and explore the robot such that it can do desirable tasks in the lab, designing protocols for faster, simpler, and more accurate sample preparation, and, if time permits, create a short manual that the engineers can use on their own without necessarily needing detailed programming skills.