In this proposal, seven faculty of the Department of Biology and of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT request funding to upgrade the liquid-handling robot at MIT's BioMicro Center, a core facility for genomics and high-throughput experiments. Robotic automation of repetitive pipetting tasks has enormous potential to accelerate the pace of molecular biological and biochemical research. Moreover, this enabling technology dramatically increases the accuracy and reproducibility of many quantitative assays. Other projects are simply not feasible without robotic manipulation due to the sheer number of pipetting steps involved. The funds requested will be used to significantly expand the capabilities of an existing Tecan robot. The Tecan robotic platform is versatile, modular, and easy to use, as required for an instrument serving a large and diverse group of users. The specific upgrades requested will improve three areas of operation: adding modules for new applications, decreasing run times, and simplifying the training requirements for new users. Broad access to this equipment, afforded by its central location in the BioMicro Center, will facilitate state-of-the-art research on a wide variety of health-related projects at MIT.
