The Scientist : Robotics for the Small Scale
The Scientist  

By Jeffrey M. Perkel

Robotics for the Small Scale

Five questions to see if you're ready to automate.

Jim Metherall, associate professor of genetics at the University of Utah, got his first robot in the mid-1990s while buried by a project on cholesterol homeostasis. "We were trying to clone a gene by complementing a mutation in mammalian cells, and we couldn't do it with an entire cDNA library, because the signal-to-noise was too low," Metherall explains. So he broke the library into small pools, isolated DNA, and then tested each pool for activity.



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