Re: [DIYbio] Re: BioPrinter won 1st Prize in Instructables Design Competition!

That's a very different application though. Our bioprinter is not intended to be a general lab robot or liquid handling tool. It's intended to print (and eventually 3D print) biological materials onto a surface.

You've got the wrong BioCurious robot in mind ;-)

Patrik


On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:53:29 PM UTC-8, Jonathan Cline wrote:

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com> wrote:

I really would love to see someone build a bioprinter that uses polar coordinates. But so far I haven't heard any arguments to make me think that approach would be any easier or better than what we did.

Automation flow.  The next stage after your liquid handling is manual removal to an incubator.  Then removal from the incubator to the imaging station.  Then pick-and-place at the selection station.  Then sample purification.  Then culturing.  etc.  How many of these stages can be combined into a 1-button-push "make me bread" machine and how many of these stages are unique pieces of equipment.  When moving a sample dish, pick-and-place is easier if any orientation of the sample dish is allowed (hence, sample dish is circular,   symmetric).  Imaging/Measurement works great if the sample dish is rotated past a scanning head (hence, sample dish is circular and rotates).  Etc.  The cartesian/human/traditional method is to slap the sample plate on a large scanner.  Hmm.  Well wouldn't a microelectronics solution point to a laser-disc type approach with a high precision micro sensor scanned across the sample, rather than increasing the physical size of the sensor into big flat bed?

I've asked a dozen lab automation experts these same types of questions and received blank looks so either it is a really dumb idea or it's so obvious that no one has thought of it yet.  hah!   Actually it's because the current state of the industry is a mix of human hands and machine.  The human hands require rectangles.

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