Introduction to the Workshop
URLs Provided by Attendees

Abstracts

Mapping

Informatics

Sequencing

Instrumentation

Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

Infrastructure

The electronic form of this document may be cited in the following style:
Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop IV, 1994.

Abstracts scanned from text submitted for November 1994 DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop. Inaccuracies have not been corrected.

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory DNA Preparation Machine

Martin J. Pollard
Human Genome Center and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

A DNA preparation machine is in a late stage of construction. It is designed to execute a modified boil prep to extract plasmid DNA from E. coli bacteria. The machine consists of a gantry style robot (827 W x 1715 L x 340 H mm) coupled with a modified IEC 7000 centrifuge capable of spinning microtiter plates to 5000 g's. The four fixed robot tools consist of two 8 channel Biomek MP200 pipettors, 5 eight channel dispensing manifolds, and a pneumatic gripper for moving the microtiter plates within the work envelope and into and out of the centrifuge. The working surface is an optical table with locating fixtures for the microtiter plates, the pipet tip racks and other miscellaneous hardware. The hot plate and the cold plate each hold two microtiter plates. The microtiter plates are pressed against the constant temperature surfaces pneumatically. The IEC 7000 centrifuge has been modified with a computer interface, an automatically lifting cover, an indexing rotor, and robot compatible sample buckets.

The instrument is controlled with a 486 Gateway 2000 PC with a Visual Basic software interface. The software interface allows both operational and teach modes. The teach mode allows the operator to develop protocol modules by guiding the robot through each step of the process and recording a description of each step in a text file. During the operational mode a collection of text files, describing the entire protocol, is read, parsed, and executed on the machine. The protocol files are easily edited in the teach mode or on a text editor.

The LBL DNA Prep Machine is designed to process samples in two microtiter plates (192 samples) in 3-4 hours. The instrument will run unattended while operating. One run will result in enough samples to produce 35 kb of finished sequence in LBL's directed sequencing strategy. This instrument will complete the series of automation modules required for obtaining sequence from plasmid inserts. The large work envelope of the machine will accommodate a variety of other applications as well.