User-centered automation process in synthetic biology research

Abstract

By designing and re-designing biological system, synthetic biology is advancing a wide range of domains from biotherapeutics for fatal cancers to biofuels and artificial meat to improve the global environment and food security. As the scale and complexity of synthetic biology endeavors are increasing, designing automation processes to replace manual labor is becoming more important to improve cost effectiveness, reproducibility, and efficiency including error reduction. Despite the desire for lab automation in the research and industry, in reality, scientists still largely rely on manual techniques in the labs even though the conventional approach becomes unmanageable and slows down their research iterations. One of the key problems is the mental barrier. According to the online survey and interviews conducted in this research, almost 90% of researchers cannot trust the quality of robot's work even though they do not know the actual success rate of the robotics work and what the robot can do. To bridge the gap for making the automation process more accessible, this research is proposing the use of "Bot", a software robot with which people can communicate through the internet and "Internet of things (IoT)". In the system, Bot is connected with the lab automation robots such as liquid handling robots. By communicating with the Bot using user-interfaces such as Slack, researchers can place work orders on lab robots and monitor their order status anytime. Moreover, people can directly ask the Bot for important information and instructions, such as protocol success rate and scheduling.