We made good progress in development a programmable fluidic-microwell interface for the Omega-Machine. This enables a combinatorial testing and analyzing of fluidic streams in continuous flow microfluidics – compatible with commonly-used microtiter plates. The operating principle is illustrated in the left schematic view. The Photo below shows the microfluidic workstation aside the microscope setup of the Omega-Machine in our lab.
For the pippetting robot we created a software package (written in C, Perl and Shell-script) for handling of all nessessary functionalities like the access of specific wells, inject or withdraw of samplesand switch of the sample loop, initialisation and cleaning.
The software allows direct access to every single function of the robot as well as defining and running of complex functions as macros. Our goal in developing the control software was also to ensure that it could be integrated into our main BioPRO-software as well as the interpreted software development environment in Mathematica.