Intelligent software for laboratory automation

Trends in Biotechnology
Ken E Whelan, Ross D King

Abstract

The automation of laboratory techniques has greatly increased the number of experiments that can be carried out in the chemical and biological sciences. Until recently, this automation has focused primarily on improving hardware. Here we argue that future advances will concentrate on intelligent software to integrate physical experimentation and results analysis with hypothesis formulation and experiment planning. To illustrate our thesis, we describe the 'Robot Scientist' - the first physically implemented example of such a closed loop system. In the Robot Scientist, experimentation is performed by a laboratory robot, hypotheses concerning the results are generated by machine learning and experiments are allocated and selected by a combination of techniques derived from artificial intelligence research. The performance of the Robot Scientist has been evaluated by a rediscovery task based on yeast functional genomics. The Robot Scientist is proof that the integration of programmable laboratory hardware and intelligent software can be used to develop increasingly automated laboratories.

References

Dec 11, 1999·Nucleic Acids Research·M Kanehisa, S Goto

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Citations

Oct 18, 2013·Inorganic Chemistry·Shohei UchinomiyaItaru Hamachi
Jan 8, 2014·Chemical Society Reviews·S A Stratmann, A M van Oijen
Mar 7, 2014·Journal of the American Chemical Society·Wei LiuYao-Wen Wu
Jan 19, 2012·BioEssays : News and Reviews in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology·Douglas B Kell
Sep 8, 2016·Pharmaceutical Research·Sean Ekins
Dec 16, 2017·Nature Reviews. Drug Discovery·Gisbert Schneider
Apr 26, 2014·Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention : APJCP·Niloofar Mohammadzadeh, Reza Safdari

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