Kaspersetz Lucas, Englert Britta, Krah Fabian, Martinez Ernesto C, Neubauer Peter, Cruz Bournazou M Nicolas
Technische Universität Berlin, Institute of Biotechnology, Chair of Bioprocess Engineering, Ackerstr. 76, 13355, Berlin, Germany.
Technische Universität Berlin, Institute of Biotechnology, Chair of Bioprocess Engineering, Ackerstr. 76, 13355, Berlin, Germany.
SLAS Technol. 2024 Dec;29(6):100214. doi: 10.1016/j.slast.2024.100214. Epub 2024 Oct 30.
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.
