Courtesy of Richard Summers
Everyone knows that the first genome sequencing projects took years of work and represent the combined product of tens of thousands of individual fragments. But what people may not have considered is that before any of those fragments could be sequenced, they first had to be cloned, picked from a library, and mini-prepped. Picking all of those colonies by hand would have required an army of technicians so, in the early 1990s, the sequencing institutes decided to automate.
"We asked our associates what were some of the onerous tasks we could help them to automate, and this was right at the top of them," recalls Joe Jaklevic, who headed up the team that designed one of the first colony pickers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where much of the human genome was unraveled.
Since then, automated colony pickers have morphed from large, single-purpose, ...
