© TAP BIOSYSTEMSLet’s face it: cell culture is tedious work. Researchers sit straight-backed with arms extended inside a laminar-flow hood. It’s usually loud and warm, and if you do a lot of it, your back and arms will ache—all of which can challenge your precision and efficiency.
These drawbacks, coupled with the nature of the job, make cell culture well-suited for automation, which offers higher accuracy and reproducibility than manual cell culture, plus a lower risk of error and contamination. Automation “brings a great deal of standardization to a process that can be quite variable if done by hand,” says Scott Noggle, lab director at the nonprofit New York Stem Cell Foundation, which has a custom-built Hamilton robotic system automating most of its culture workflow. Off-the-shelf solutions exist as well (see “Set It and Forget It,” The Scientist, March 2013).
But these high-end systems can cost $1 million or more, putting them out of the reach of most academic and core lab facilities. Other platforms, however, automate various individual steps of the ...
