Journal of Laboratory Automation

In the case of development of new products in organic synthesis, the final step of the process must offer the best purity. In this way, the final step is a unit operation of isolation like distillation, crystallisation or liquid-liquid extraction. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate a module of purification on an automated platform for achieving the whole process.

In our case, an automated platform was based on Zymark architecture allowing us to automate sample preparation and the reaction steps. For the purification module, we opted to develop our own home module: a liquid-liquid extraction module. This unit operation permits us to separate the final product in the case of peptide synthesis in liquid phase, but equally, in the case of isolation of vegetable molecules.

The module capacities had to permit the multistage extraction and the determination of the binodal curve for optimising the process, and to possess in our own system for liberating the Zymark robot for other tasks. The operator interface is developed by using a SCADA (supervisory control).

Recently Organon installed automated screening and plate preparation systems for its research facilities in Oss (The Netherlands) and Newhouse (UK). These robotic systems have been developed in close collaboration between Organon and Scitec Laboratory Automation (Lausanne, Switzerland), now part of the Zymark corporation.

Each of the systems consists of three linear track robots, one of which performs the screening process using standard peripherals. The other two robots take care of the plate preparation and ‘cherry-picking’ procedures. To this end, copies of our total mother plate collection are stored under controlled conditions in Scitec plate stackers (AutoStack) that can be addressed by one of the two robots. The system is designed in such a way that the loading and refreshment of the on-line storage, screening-plate preparation, and ‘cherry-picking’ can be executed automatically in 24 hours operation.

Our objective is to eliminate the digital divide that persists between the physical and information spaces of wet-lab based enterprises by embedding computational resources into the shared laboratory environment. Our first challenge is to enable individual lab workers to contribute to a fine-grained formal representation of ongoing lab activities — to build the database by doing the work, without having to stop and write things down in a notebook or to enter information into a computer. By eliminating the redundancy of doing the work and then recording it, accuracy and completeness will be improved. And, by capturing information at a finer detail than is practical for manual entry systems, unanticipated applications can be supported.