Dear Friends

As a part of my new endeavor, I am looking into equipment (robotics) that can handle mammalian cell lines. Is there anyone of you that have experience with which equipment to chose, what to whach out for etc..?

All the Best

Bjørn

Hi Bjørn,

have a look at this page, perhaps you'll find what you're looking for (e.g. the ambr system):

http://www.tapbiosystems.com/tap/applications/index.htm

The systems are not cheap though, especially the bigger ones (I had asked for the sonata system for the robotic insect cell culture, the price was at the higher end of the six-digit scale (in Euro!) despite the discount :-))

Good luck!

Hüseyin

Hi Bjoern,

You should talk to Radu Aricescu at Oxford:

http://www.strubi.ox.ac.uk/strubi/research/aricescu/

He has a robot that does mammalian cell culture, I think they custom-built it together with a company, but I think it only works with adhesive cultures.

best,

Peggy

Dear Björn,

I am as well looking for proper automation strategies. We are interested in Robotics for cloning selection and automation of the initial cultivation steps. I have not yet decided which clone selection system we can use. The cell colonies have to be imbedded in agarose or in methylcellulose up to now we where not that successful in growing vital colonies of our Insect cell lines in the semi solid media.

I think the system in Oxford from TAP is very usefull but it is depending on the protocolls you would like to perform on the machine and of course decent supervision by a dedicated person.

This is however an emerging step in mammalian cell line maintenance. Who will have the best and affordable idees?

Best Joop

Hi Joop

Thanks for your input. I have also been looking at the TAP systems, that look pretty interesting.

After going through some of the options, I am putting this a bit on hold. I will prioritise setting up our pipeline manually first, to see where the bottlenecks appear before embarking on automating parts of the process.

It sounds that what you  need is a LEAP machine, that is sadly not on the market anymore. We have one of the last machines they sold before changing their business strategy to stricktly keep the machines in-house and do fee-for-service instead.

You can see more on the LEAP here:

http://corefacilities.systemsbiology.net/imaging/fccscp/cytellect_leap.php

I do not know whether there is any similar equipment out there, but given the LEAP company's business plan there should be room for competing technology.

Cheers

Bjørn