Week 3 HW: lab automation

PAPER - Semiautomated Production of Cell-Free Biosensors

Journal: ACS Synthetic Biology (2025)

PMID: 40073441

Biosensors are biological systems that detect specific chemicals for example, if a substance is present, they might change color or glow. These can be used for:

  1. Environmental detection (e.g., fluoride in water)
  2. Health diagnostics
  3. Rapid point-of-need testing

But traditionally, making lots of biosensor reactions by hand is slow and inconsistent. Different people might mix things slightly differently, which leads to variability in performance.

Instead of assembling all the biosensor reactions manually, the researchers used a robotic liquid-handling platform (like Opentrons OT-2) to semi-automate the process:

  1. They wrote a protocol so the robot could prepare many reactions systematically
  2. They tested this by building a full 384-well plate of biosensors that detect fluoride
  3. They compared how well these robot-assembled reactions worked compared with manually assembled one

The robot-assembled biosensors worked as expected

The perks of the automated robot:OT-2

  1. Using robots makes it possible to produce many biosensors quickly and reliably
  2. This reduces human error when preparing them
  3. It helps scale up manufacturing or testing so the sensors can be widely deployed

Idea 1: Carbon Capturing Microbial Genomics

What I would automate

Reasons for automation: Screen many strains simultaneously Maintain equal CO₂ exposure conditions Reduce pipetting variation Generate reproducible comparative data