By Siddarth Raghuvanshi, Undergraduate Summer Student
In September 2019, the new Biofactorial (B!) automation and screening facility opened for business in UBC. Located on the second floor of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), the facility aims to assist UBC researchers in automation and high-throughput biology applications to help reduce experimental costs and enhance the speed of research.
In September 2019, the new Biofactorial (B!) automation and screening facility opened for business in UBC. Located on the second floor of the Life Sciences Institute (LSI), the facility aims to assist UBC researchers in automation and high-throughput biology applications to help reduce experimental costs and enhance the speed of research.
At the heart of B! is the Labcyte Access Workstation. The Access workstation is composed of a robotic arm, an incubator, plate reader, thermocycler, bulk dispenser, plate sealer and peeler, a centrifuge and an Echo. The Echo is an acoustic liquid dispenser which uses sound to move droplets from one plate to the other. This allows the liquid-handling process to be faster and more accurate at lower volumes compared to a traditional pipette based liquid handler. According to Dr. Tom Pfeifer, B! facility manager, the facility currently has three major focuses: “compound screening, functional genomics, and biochemical and cellular based assays”. The facility is currently running multiple projects including enzyme and compound screening and high-throughput sequencing library construction.
A major benefit to B! is the small volumes required, which makes experimentation significantly cheaper. For example, in the case of PCR, the B! allows PCR reactions to be run down to a 2.5µl volume (in comparison, a standard tube requires 25µl of liquid), which reduces the cost three to 10 times. Dr. Pfeifer says that current 96 and 384 well plate experiments can be easily transformed into a B! workflow which is beneficial for Centre for Blood Research (CBR) scientists already working in that format.
Aside from the Labcyte Access workstation, the facility is also equipped with an Illumina Miseq, a QPix, two Biomek liquid handling robots and a Hydra liquid handler. Various groups at UBC within the LSI and MSL have used the facility for replication of libraries or assay development. In addition, Dr. Steven Hallam mentions that “their large insert metagenomic libraries will be made available as a resource for collaborative research”. The enormous potential value of these libraries made headlines recently, as Dr. Steven Withers in collaboration with Dr. Hallam and CBR member, Dr. Jay Kizhakkedathu, used a library from the human gut microbiome to discover an enzyme that converts the sugars on the surfaces to red blood cells to the universal donor type. In addition to screening, the facility also supports high-dimensional data analysis and information visualization.
According to Drs. Hallam and Pfeifer, B! operates on a cost-recovery basis and addresses several of the current gaps in high-throughput infrastructure within the Life Sciences Institute. CBR scientists who want to increase their research throughput are encouraged to learn more.
The B! facility is currently open for business and is interested in setting up needs assessments with interested users. Please contact Tom Pfeifer at tpfeifer@mail.ubc.ca to schedule a visit.