The nucleic acid preparation automated system 

The robot (Hamilton Robotics) installed on TWB’s high-throughput microbial strain engineering platform enables the automated preparation of nucleic acids. 

The robotic liquid handling platform performs, in a

: plasmid DNA, genomic DNA, DNA fragment purification and RNA purification. The system uses both to use

. The manipulation zone is protected by laminar flow (air supply ceiling equipped with a HEPA filter). The robotic platform is equipped with two pipetting tools, one pipetting arm with 8 independent channels and a 96-channel pipetting head both pipetting a volume range of

. The configuration of the robot’s deck is designed to

: two vacuum stations (filtration on filter plates), two magnetic stands (extractions by immobilization on magnetic beads), two agitators for microplates and two thermostated modules (4-99°C).

Several

are used for the

:

• A UV-visible micro-volume multi-sample Nanodrop 8000 spectrophotometer for measuring concentrations by measure of absorbance
• A 96-well pre-cast agarose gel electrophoresis system for the quality control of supercoiled DNA
• Two systems of capillary electrophoresis with average throughput (Bioanalyzer Agilent) and high throughput (GXII Perkin Elmer) for the quality control of linear DNA and quality assessment of RNA by RIN (RNA Integrity Number).

This type of robot is commonly used for several types of applications and projects:

• Synthetic biology, genetic and metabolic engineering, strain engineering
• Enzyme evolution
• Protein expression
• DNA libraries construction.

The full implementation of the standard protocols for nucleic acid purification is scheduled for

. Other protocols can be custom-developed on this station in response to a specific request.