Personal Robotics for Omics with High Density Yeast Arrays.
Charles Boone (1), Amy Tong (1), Pawel Kusan (2), Harry Singer (3), Carl Singer (3)
(1) Best Institute, University of Toronto, 112 College St, Toronto, ON, M5G 1l6, Canada; (2) Engineering Services Inc., Toronto Ontario Canada M5R 2J7; (3) Singer Instrument Co Ltd, Roadwater, Watchet, Somerset TA23 ORE England
We developed a relatively inexpensive and simple robotics system for manipulation of high-density yeast arrays. Our goal was to create a system that would enable individual yeast labs to manipulate high-density yeast arrays rapidly and efficiently, allowing reagent sets such as the deletion mutant collection and the complete set of cloned yeast genes to be utilized for large-scale two-hybrid, synthetic genetic array, phenotypic and chemical-genetic analysis. Instead of standard lab velvets, the RoTor robot utilizes plastic replica plating pads, facilitating the transfer and construction of yeast arrays containing 96, 384, and 1536 colonies per plate.