Freedom EVO® platform with Pickolo™ colony-picker for biofuel production
Abengoa Bioenergy New Technologies, based in Seville, Spain, is an international company applying innovative solutions for biofuel production. In this context, the Company was seeking to establish and automate a screening process to determine cellulase activity in mutant strains of cellulase producing fungi.
Since manual screening processes are very costly and time consuming, automation was a prerequisite for a project of this magnitude. Abengoa established close collaborations with Biomar Microbial Technologies and Mejoran Lab Automation to create the optimal solution. Biomar, located in León, Spain, is a pioneer in research into micro biological applications to generate sustainable solutions in sectors such as healthcare,
agriculture and renewable energy, and therefore has a solid background in generation, screening and bioactivity profiling of microbial collections. Mejoran, based in Madrid, Spain, is a laboratory automation solution provider.
The first step in the three-stage screening process was selection of colonies of different fungal mutants and their transfer to a 96-well plate to create microinocula for further
fermentation. The second step involved fermentation of the different mutants in a 96-well plate format. Finally, the cellulase-producing capability of the different mutants was
evaluated.
A Freedom EVO 150 workstation with SciRobotics' Pickolo
colony-picker module proved the ideal solution for performing both the fungal selection and the subsequent screening of different culture conditions. The Freedom EVO workstation can easily identify, select and pick fungal colonies based on
user-selected criteria. Additionally, Freedom EVOware® and the Pickolo software allowed Mejoran to define a unique picking procedure that achieved 100 % microinoculum growth for subsequent experiments. This was accomplished by
picking from the perimeter of the fungal colonies, rather than from the center, in a sweeping motion which optimized the amount of biomass taken up by the tip.
29 июл 2013
