Upgrade of Tecan Robotic Liquid-Handling Equipment

描述(由申请人提供)：在这份提案中，麻省理工学院生物系和科赫癌症综合研究所的七名教员申请资金，以升级麻省理工学院生物微中心的液体处理机器人，该中心是基因组学和高通量实验的核心设施。机器人自动化重复的进样任务具有极大的潜力，可以加快分子生物学和生化研究的步伐。此外，这项使能技术大大提高了许多定量分析的准确性和重现性。由于涉及的移液步骤太多，如果没有机器人的操纵，其他项目是不可行的。申请的资金将用于显著扩展现有Tecan机器人的能力。Tecan机器人平台是多功能、模块化和易于使用的，这是为大量和多样化的用户群服务的仪器所需的。所要求的具体升级将改进三个方面的操作：为新应用程序增加模块，减少运行时间，以及简化新用户的培训要求。由于其位于生物显微中心的中心位置，人们可以广泛使用这种设备，这将促进对麻省理工学院各种与健康相关的项目的最先进研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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.