ACAPELLA-5K, a high-throughput automated genome and chemical analysis system

• Published in: Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453) Vol. 3; pp. 2321 - 2328 vol.3
• Main Authors: Meldrum, D.R., Fisher, C.H., Moore, M.P., Saini, M., Holl, M.R., Pence, W.H., Moody, S.E., Cunningham, D.L., Wiktor, P.J.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Automation; Bioinformatics; Chemical analysis; Chemical processes; DNA; Genomics; Laboratories; Pipelines; Protocols; Reproducibility of results
• ISBN: 0780378601; 9780780378605
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2003.1249217

A capillary-based fluid handling system bas been developed to process 5000 samples in 8 hours. The system takes deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or other chemical samples and automatically processes them as specified in a user-defined protocol with aspiration, dispensing, mixing, thermal cycling, and imaging steps. A serial pipeline process is used to provide flexibility, reproducibility, and reliability for the samples prepared. This laboratory automation system dispenses 40-100 pL droplet volumes using piezoelectric reagent dispensers and prepares 1 or 2-/spl mu/L final reaction volumes, a 3 to 5-fold reduction in reagent usage over current (2003) state-of-the-art manual and automated instrumentation. Extensive testing of the system has been performed with the University of Washington Genome Center. Applications for ACAPELLA-5K include DNA sequencing, diagnostics, minimal residual disease quantification, drug discovery, environmental testing, forensics, protein crystallography, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and so on.