Management of experimental workflows in robotic cultivation platforms
- PMID: 39486480
- DOI: 10.1016/j.slast.2024.100214
Management of experimental workflows in robotic cultivation platforms
Abstract
In the last decades, robotic cultivation facilities combined with automated execution of workflows have drastically increased the speed of research in biotechnology. In this work, we present the design and deployment of a digital infrastructure for robotic cultivation platforms. We implement a Workflow Management System, using Directed Acyclic Graphs, based on the open-source platform Apache Airflow to increase traceability and the automated execution of experiments. We demonstrate the integration and automation of experimental workflows in a laboratory environment with a heterogeneous device landscape including liquid handling stations, parallel cultivation systems, and mobile robots. The feasibility of our approach is assessed in parallel E. coli fed-batch cultivations with glucose oscillations in which different elastin-like proteins are produced. We show that the use of workflow management systems in robotic cultivation platforms increases automation, robustness and traceability of experimental data.
Keywords: Bioprocess development; Directed acyclic graphs; Mobile robots; Workflow automation.
Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Conflict of interest statement
Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Co-Author Fabian Krah was a student at TU Berlin and is now employed by BTC Business Technology Consulting AG. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.