Episode 7: Navigating the complexities of lab automation (with Dr. Mike Mueller, Nucleus Automation Partners)

Andrew Lee: [00:00:00] I’ve got here today, Mike Mueller from Nucleus Automation. Our discussion will be focused on automated liquid handlers in general, but a little bit more focused, on the TECAN.

Given Mike’s background with the TECAN system. He will also elaborate that he’s got extensive experience on other automated liquid handlers. So, here I’m joined with Mike Mueller today, founder of Nucleus Automation, and he’s worked with various automation systems for years. You can see a video of us early this year at the conference called S. L. A. S the society for laboratory automation and screening. Mike.

Thanks Andrew for the introduction. Great to be here. Yeah, SLAS great conference. So many familiar faces running into year after year out there.

So, before starting nucleus automation, can you elaborate a little bit more about your prior experience in general?

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So it’s been more than a decade now I’ve been working in lab automation and found my way into it accidentally. I’d been working in a number of [00:01:00] startup companies earlier in my career. And back in 2013, I found myself as the only engineer in a company full of scientists, uh, companies making NGS library prep kits.

Analyze the kits and we saw automation as a way of supporting larger customers and selling more reagents. And so I was programming up these kits on all the different liquid handler platforms in the process. Learn pretty much every way you can make an NGS library kit fail on a robot, and then what it takes to make it work as well.

And, from there I joined TECAN, and there I got to program up a huge variety of different kits, and different customer applications, always on a TECAN, either Fluent or TECAN Evo platform. And, I started at TECAN just as the Fluent platform was launching, so we really got in on the ground floor with that platform.

Andrew Lee: So, if I could interject NGS for the audience or the listeners NGS refers to what?

Mike Mueller: Next generation sequencing.

Andrew Lee: So it’s for the DNA technology, right? So you take massive amounts of DNA [00:02:00] and you’re doing really the second generation or even a third generation of DNA sequencing. And it takes a lot of sample prep. Uh, previously it was done manually, but you focused on the automation side of it.

That’s exciting.

Mike Mueller: Absolutely. It’s a tedious process to do by hand, a lot of hours of manual labor, but definitely can do it on a robot and streamline that process.

Andrew Lee: That’s awesome. And then you also mentioned one other thing, uh, that’s very interesting from an engineering side, but also, It’s important for the scientists who are probably some of our listeners, that you highlighted this comment about knowing how much to fail or knowing all of the parameters that makes it fail or where it could go wrong. I like that part. Why is that important?

Mike Mueller: Yeah., there’s a lot of experience that comes into this, , these are complex systems and there’s a troubleshooting process. And so it’s very helpful to have the experience to know, like, Hey, I’ve seen this before, , and for example, next gen sequencing, if you leave ethanol behind in the well, it’ll cause it to fail.

There’s a lot of, like, well, these [00:03:00] instruments are very sensitive mechanical instruments that got to be dialed in just right. So the, heights have to be right and everything. And knowing when something doesn’t work right the 1st time, where to look when you’ve got, 100 steps back to back in a process, it certainly is a helpful thing.

Again, And it takes hours, , of time, , day after day, getting there. But I went through that process, , starting, 10 years plus ago. And, so now when I see these things come up, it’s like, oh yeah, I’ve seen this, a dozen times before. So, it’s easy to take care of.

Andrew Lee: Nice. Nice. And before lab automation, you mentioned that you work at startup companies. But what was your background in?

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So my background is, electrical engineering, in college. I worked at IBM as an intern working on computer servers. I was in semiconductor industry. I was always interested in medical applications or robotics. I worked at startup companies doing micro valves. I worked at a medical imaging company.

So a lot of different software applications and sensors and hardware. And then I went into grad school and did a PhD in bioengineering.

Andrew Lee: Nice. So, [00:04:00] for some of the young listeners, if they wanted to enter this automation field, what do you think is a beneficial major or what sort of career path would you recommend?

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So lab automation is an interdisciplinary field. So I think you can approach it from a different, a few different angles. Certainly there’s majors like cell, molecular biology, chemistry can be valuable, as can computer science, biomedical engineering or other engineering disciplines, A lot of lab automators that I’ve worked with start on the biology side, and then they pick up the programming

aspect later. I did the other way. I started with programming first and then I took a lot of biology courses as part of my graduate program, in grad school.

Andrew Lee: I see the logic for the science, the life science or the chemistry majors. Versus the programmers, you can cross those 2 boundaries or do those 2 majors, but then their process or thinking process is different. Have you seen that?

Mike Mueller: Yeah. And I think, a lot of people that are computer science [00:05:00] oriented, if they’re going into life sciences, bioinformatics is like the really common, area too. But if like for me, I’m much more involved in the hardware side and I like seeing things moving around and mechanical aspects.

So, I love the robots. And, uh, automation is a great aspect, for people that want to get more hands on with the mechanical side of things.

Andrew Lee: So now you started a nucleus automation , your own company. So what made you start your own company?

Mike Mueller: Yeah, great question. So, we started the company, shortly after, uh, during the pandemic time. And, during the pandemic, at the beginning, I was working at TECAN. And we saw just a lot of need for application support. All the vendors were absolutely slammed with demand for liquid handling instruments, people can get the hardware fast enough and they needed a lot of support getting up and running and working with this over the years, we’ve seen, sometimes it can take, a long time to get the instruments up and running.

Sometimes it’s months, sometimes, , after the instruments put in, it could take, the better part of a year before processes,, in a production environment, but it doesn’t [00:06:00] have to take that long. With the right experience, you can get something up and running in potentially a matter of weeks.

And so we’ve looked at really just condensing down the. The cycle from when an instrument goes in and getting it up and running productively for people or helping people reconfigure the instruments as well. So really just looking at, helping people go faster, more tailored to their applications and really helping to make the best use of this equipment.

In a productive way.

Andrew Lee: I agree on all fronts in terms of getting an automation started. It’s nice to have the robot in place, but then you need the people who know how to use it and to service it and to fix it. To optimize it, there’s just no way around it. And you can have a fancy paperweight expensive paperweight, or you can actually have a very robust system, depending on the person who touches it and programs it.

Mike Mueller: Well, there’s a steep learning curve to it as well. So, you can try to figure it out on your own, but it helps to learn from other people that are already familiar with it. I’ve had people that I worked with earlier in my career [00:07:00] that knew the robots overall as well and mentored me on some of this aspect.

Andrew Lee: I mean, I kind of did a very, very light touch on fluent recently, and there’s so many commands that I probably haven’t even touched yet. And, it’s definitely interesting. You could spend an entire career just playing with that 1 instrument. So you mentioned things that you’re troubleshooting for the customers.

Are there any particular without going into 2 specifics without violating any confidentiality agreements? That is a common mistake that people can keep an eye out for.

Mike Mueller: Yeah, I think , in a lot of cases, just knowing the common ways things can fail there’s a lot of details in this stuff, right? And understanding all the interdependencies, interrelationships, sometimes between different hardware pieces, , in these programs, you want to test all those sort of edge cases.

A lot of times people set things up for variable number of samples. And so then it’s a question of testing in the right way. Like if you do it in a set of eight. With the eight channels, it may work fine, but if you set it up incorrectly for [00:08:00] a variable number of samples, you try to run like 11 samples, maybe, it wasn’t quite right, for example, so knowing, where to test things in a way to make sure you capture all the different conditions, I think is important aspect of it.

Andrew Lee: I mean, it just kind of expands from there. It’s unlimited variations to it.

Mike Mueller: A lot of permutations. And so knowing like the likely places or, there could be a mistake in the code or things like that and testing it. In a structured way, to expose those things really important.

Andrew Lee: I mean, the beauty of that kind of the personal touches that. You’re flexible and you accommodate such variables at a time. And then I guess the crust, the drawback of it is that because you are so flexible and you actually try different things, there’s inconsistencies by doing it by hand. So, it’s a blessing in 1 way that you’re flexible as a person to do different things, but then you are not doing it consistently, or you get bored of it and doing it consistently.

So, Mike, what are some of the common requests from the [00:09:00] customers

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So a lot of our customers, they just want to move faster. Sometimes they bring an automation and they underestimate the ramp up period, , the time it takes to get up to speed working with the system. And it really just needs some dedicated attention. It’s not easy. It’s not an easy thing to pick up working part time on it, or while juggling a bunch of other job responsibilities.

You really need uninterrupted blocks of time in front of the system and, somewhat related, , we’ve done a fair number of projects where we’ve been brought in to fix something that was either poorly implemented in the first place or, some other troublesome aspect to it. Maybe it’s not getting good data or it’s taking too long, , to run the process or the scripts are too difficult for the end user to use or troubleshooter.

Whatever the case may be, sometimes we can do precision edits and salvage it. Sometimes it’s just, done so poorly, you have to throw it out and start over again. The quality of the work out there, from different sources, highly variable. And so if you’re going to hire it out, you really want to make sure

you got the right partner with a solid track [00:10:00] record. As for a specific application request, we had a lot of requests around next generation sequencing, library prep, proteomics workflows, sample prep for mass spec, ELISA, chromatography applications, and it’s not just pipetting. You know, one of the other things that we do is help customers on the informatics side could be interfacing, liquid handlers with LIMS or LIS systems.

Setting a bar coding and sample tracking or interfacing them with downstream instruments.

Andrew Lee: That runs a whole gamut of just labs? Every lab operation requires all, I mean, everything you just listed. And it’s a very powerful tool that you can incorporate to do a lot of different things, but you just have to get it programmed correctly. And you hit it right on the head is that somebody needs to sit in front of that instrument and watch it and run it.

And also you covered it early on, you sort of need to know where the failure points are so that you don’t fail. And I think that’s across the board on multiple fronts, especially in this industry.

Mike Mueller: Yeah, I think, the [00:11:00] liquid handler is a really unique instrument in that most of the gadgets in the lab are single purpose, single use. You have analyzers where you load it and it does one particular thing. A plate reader reads the plate, a plate washer washes the plate. Blood analyzer, gives you a result.

In a clinical way, but a liquid handler can be programmed to do pretty much anything. And so, people buy them for completely different purposes. You see them in agricultural companies, clinical labs, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, all doing totally different things, with the same essential hardware.

Andrew Lee: Seems like you know your automated liquid handlers. So for the fun of it, , how many liquid handlers can you list in 30 seconds, maybe even in alphabetical order?

Mike Mueller: I don’t know about alphabetical order, but I name a whole bunch of, liquid handlers for you. We got, Agilent Bravo, Beckman Biomek, Caliper Cyclones, uh, Dispendix, Eppendorf EP motions, TECAN Genesis Evo and Fluent. We got the [00:12:00] Felix, there’s the, FLO i8, Gilson, Hamilton Star, Hamilton Vantage, HiRes Prime.

Hudson robotics. They got the solo and some other platforms. Integra’s, Beckman’s got the FX, FXP, i5, i7. There’s a Janus, from Perkin Elmer Revvity, Dynamic Devices, Lynx, MicroLab prep from Hamilton, the Nimbus at Hamilton. Opentrons, yeah, there’s a lot of them out there.

We work with many, many, many of them.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, and they all have different pipettes and they all have different programming kind of modules or

Mike Mueller: programming, different quirks to them, different primary applications in some cases, but, each has its own, benefits and reasons to use them or, trade offs involved in how you set them up and everything.

Andrew Lee: Awesome. Yeah. And I was looking through kind of our communication over the year and we actually met ,now, it’s been over a year. I think it was back in March last year when we first contacted you.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. I think I was [00:13:00] still in San Diego for SLAS back then.

Andrew Lee: Or February. I guess. Yeah, I think we contacted you February, March of last year. And I think our request from IMCS side was we just acquired two different TECAN units and we needed some help on it and training on it and we reached out to you. I think we got lucky. We found you literally by Googling, TECAN programmers.

And I think you popped up. And then, of course, we did our due diligence, looking into your background, your LinkedIn post and so forth. But you have a pretty lengthy track record, working in automation already, just looking up, Google search.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. And your project’s been really fun to work with because of some of the unconventional aspects to it, which I really like, it doesn’t follow the normal, pickup tip aspirate dispense drop tip cycle of a traditional process. It makes it more interesting, getting the hardware to, to do what it needs to do for you guys.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, we’ve been doing that quite a bit for 2 different systems, Hamilton and Dynamic Devices and programming the [00:14:00] pistons to move independently of the, plastic pipette engagements. I mean, all the coverages that we kind of initially talked about was on liquid handling or transferring samples back and forth, but you touched upon a concept called chromatography.

And I think there’s other systems out there that focuses on transferring liquids and just running the liquid handlers in a traditional manner, but we’ve , pivoted from that, and we’re looking at a dispersive extraction and then also a top load approach where we move the pistons before we even engaged the tips.

So, I’d like to talk a little bit about the differences on the TECAN for the listeners who are not familiar with TECANS. We’re going to throw in 2 different brands or 2 different names on the TECANS, the Evo and the Fluent. Do you mind kind of covering a little bit more detail about those 2 systems?

Mike Mueller: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s the Evo platform, which has been out for probably 15 plus, almost 20 years. A TECAN sort of their flagship liquid handler for many years. And then there’s the fluent, which is the newer model, and launched in [00:15:00] 2014. And, it’s probably the one that a lot of people are buying today.

I was an application scientist. I think I mentioned when the fluent launched. And so I’ve seen pretty much all the hardware iterations of it in the very beginning and early stages of software, which is called Fluent Control and then many of the updates that they’ve made, to it over the years.

Both the Evo and the Fluent, they have different sizes, essentially small, medium and large. And they have different ARM types and configurations in terms of the order you can put them in. 8 channel ARM, 96 or 384. Channel arm, gripper arm, and, such an endless amount of different devices that can be integrated into them.

And so we do traditional programming. We work with, work lists. We’ll create automated work list generators, and work cells. We can control the instrument through API. And do pretty much anything you can throw at it. And we actually had to use some of the tricks that we know for your application as well.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, even for IMCS. I don’t think we’ve touched all the front end of [00:16:00] the bells and whistles of a TECAN fluent, like the schedulers, the sample management and the limbs or the lists, none of that is actually at the moment relevant, but it would be nice to have as we start to scale up and really schedule the chromatography runs in a more high throughput setting.

There’s an older instrument TECAN, I didn’t know about this, but it’s called the Genesis.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. In fact, there is, we’ve actually done a few projects on these older Genesis instruments to actually predate my time at TECAN. But TECAN makes quality instruments. And so they’re often still running even, 15, 20 years after they’ve been installed. They’re old enough. They’re not traditionally supported by the manufacturer at this time.

But we help people out with them where we can.

Andrew Lee: So, you recently came to IMCS to install a colony picking device or this 3rd party hardware on the TECAN Evo called the Pickolo, and the Pickolo is nice to have, I mean, it’s got the imaging system. You have to integrate the imaging system with the TECAN to control the pipette of channels to [00:17:00] actually go in and target each of those bacteria colonies and pick those out and then move it to a 96-well.

What are some of the challenges that you faced? And then maybe for the listeners, they can think ahead and say, all right, you know what, I’ve got all the system, we’re going to be up and running fast as we can. We’re going to pick 800 colonies per hour. But the reality is, we spent probably three days just to make sure that everything’s running smoothly, right?

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So, you essentially have a couple of different things happening. You have an add on module that has its own software. So there’s another software layer for the imaging part of it. You have the robot software that controls the actual mechanical movements of the arms. And so you have to get those two pieces coordinated together.

But then you also have, non traditional lab where so petri dishes are maybe less commonly used in like a Microwell Plate or test tube on instruments. You can really got to get that dialed in and you start, using things like racks or you’re stacking them up and you’ve got to make sure the heights on each of those is correct. You might have, 15 dishes in a stack and you want to be able to pull at each of 15 positions to make sure it, doesn’t [00:18:00] crash and moves it from the right, position onto the, imaging position. So there’s a lot of just mechanical aspects that have to be dialed in. And then also you’ve got the, kind of the work list generation where the image are sort of,, Identifies the colonies and it’s not in a perfect 96 well plate format.

You’ve got to be able to grab it from exactly the right spot on the dish, which is going to change every time based on how it images it.

Andrew Lee: I mean, even like a simple concept, I don’t think it’s a simple command, but a simple concept as taking the colony and moving it in sequence to 96 positions on a 96 well plate. You’re not always going to pick 96 bacteria colonies from a single plate. You’re going to have to grab a couple plates. So what happens if you grab two plates?

And from the 2 plates, you end up having 110 or 120 columns. So you’re going to actually have 120 cultures, 2 different plates, and you have to be able to track those and relay all that information.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. And that’s some of the [00:19:00] complexity that starts to get built into these scripts. As you build them out, you set up for variable number of samples, and then you get questions like, how do you want to condense these? If you have, for example. A dish that has less than 96 samples in it, and then you want to pick up the next dish and pick it up in the destination plate.

So you have sort of no gaps in the plate or, or do you have a dedicated plate for each dish? So things like that all change the programming. You got to figure out the system you want to use, um, how that’s handled.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, from IMCS perspective, this is the front end of it. So we need the recombinant proteins expressed in order to have the recombinant proteins expressed. We need to have these different constructs or DNA constructs inserted into the colonies and each of the colonies are going to have different proteins that are being expressed so that’s the front end of it.

But as we tie in, we actually developed a lot on the middle part. So, we’re building things in terms of a lab operation middle out. I know there’s that Silicon Valley sitcom, the [00:20:00] middle out kind of. Play on a joke, but the middle portion of it is the affinity chromatography built into the tip.

And then we also do a buffer exchange within the tip. And this is where some of the intricacies of the programming. Came into play, and we focused on that very early on., more or less about 6 months or so., the IMCS affinity tips, one of the challenges that we faced is that we can’t use a traditional click and drop, commands, right? What was sort of your approach in thinking about, implementing IMCS tips, especially on the affinity side, not so much on the, buffer exchange, But on the affinity.

Mike Mueller: Yeah, so I think there’s really 2 things that are unique in terms of software hurdles. You have to overcome and work with the process. 1 is you have to essentially you have liquid in a tip already, which is sort of an assumption that the software vendors assume you’re using, empty tips traditionally, right?

And normally they assume you’re going to [00:21:00] start by picking up a tip and then you’re going to do an aspirate dispense and then drop the tip. And so with your guys process, you have the resin in the tip. You sort of flip the order of things. You essentially need to move the plunger first before you pick up the tip.

So you can push the liquid out of the tip and getting the software to do that is sort of a, it’s own a challenge. And then the other thing you’ve got is you potentially have steps where you’re adding liquids into a tip that already has liquid in it. And so most of the software, it’s fine for dispensing into a micro plate, dispensing into a tube, but it treats a tip box differently. It doesn’t assume you’re going to use that as a destination to pipette things. Most processes wouldn’t do that or, that would just, ruin their otherwise clean tip. So most of the software, out of the box would have checks to prevent that from happening.

So we have to work around some of those inherent checks for their intended for traditional processes and flip the script, for you guys process, which is what makes it interesting,[00:22:00]

Andrew Lee: Yeah, you covered that 1st step because we use a lot. I mean, the affinity tips like capturing antibodies or protein a derivatives and there’s so many different protein a or nickel IMAC or IMAC immobilized metal affinity chromatography, these resins. are agarose-based and they’re swollen with, liquid.

So we store them with 20 percent storage buffer and when you receive it, you need to blow that liquid out. And most, like you said, the default coding is that it’ll pick up the tip, it’ll move over and pipette a liquid solution and then dispense that whatever was aspirated. But in this case, you’ve got a certain volume of liquid that’s a storage buffer and that needs to be removed.

So, again, you came up with a creative way to move the pistons independently of that and blow it out completely. So now it’s working. Beautifully. And then the other part is that because the chromatography is containing resin, and it also contains filters to [00:23:00] retain those particles, the default coding, I think it senses some pressures, or it senses it as if it’s clogged tip.

Right and that’s the default protections that are built into a lot of the liquid handlers .

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So that goes back to, again, some of the assumptions that the vendors make in their software, they assume the tip is empty to start with. And so they’ve built in pressure monitoring, which can be helpful on applications like, whole blood processing. You don’t want to have a blood clot in the tip, for example, that would prevent the

accurate pipetting volumes. As you mentioned, it’s sensitive hardware, and so, but it’s not on all applications. And so, like, in your application, we don’t want that to happen. And so we will work around it.

Andrew Lee: And then I noticed on the older model, the old Evo is the older model. It has the channels and it can accommodate the 1 mil tip, the 200 microliter or different sizes tips. But on the MCA or now on the Evo, it’s limited, depending on the configurations, you’re limited to a 200 or a 500 microliter tip, [00:24:00] right?

Mike Mueller: Yeah, so on the fluent on their traditional like 3D forehead that has a 96 head adapter. That one will go up to 500 microliter on the tip. And now they have a new head, that does the, 96 channels with the one mil tip as well. Which has launched, this year.

Andrew Lee: And the affinity tip works now. I mean, I’ve been playing with those, on the channels, you have to program each individual channel to function in that particular way. Whereas with the, MCA you can program it to do all 96 with the 1 mil tip and do 90 extraction 96 extraction at once.

Mike Mueller: Yeah, exactly. On the eight channel, it’s really more like eight independent single channels. You can have different volumes in the different channels. Typically, most applications you still have the, you know, it’s just doing more of the same thing. So you might have it even across all the channels, but you could have, like normalization process.

You’d have different volumes and different channels. 96 head, you have all channels are the same volume.

Andrew Lee: Now, there’s also a 2nd , product series [00:25:00] called the SizeX, it’s focused on the size exclusion chromatography and that 1 presented a slightly different challenge. Right? You kind of covered or touched upon it early on is that you’re transferring a liquid into the tip. where most systems you’re pipetting with the pipette tip.

You’re not transferring liquid into a tip.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. So again, the challenge there is just getting it to dispense into, the tip itself. I think, in your case, one of the tricks we used was we had a imaginary plate stacked on top of tip box to trick the software into dispensing into a plate that wasn’t there, which effectively let it dispense into the

tip. So again, creative work arounds to some of the inherent limitations, or the, traditional thinking that goes into the majority of processes in your case, really unique application, putting the resin in the tip and doing the process inside the tip itself, rather than using like external column.

And so then it’s just getting the software to accommodate this, novel workflow.

Andrew Lee: The other concern as I watch that [00:26:00] workflow happen is that the height difference of those lab wares, they have to be pretty tightly kind of dialed in. Otherwise, you’re going to have things crashing into each other,

Mike Mueller: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s one of the key things, the work that I do is getting these things dialed in exactly the way they need to be, and then also understanding all the interdependencies. A lot of times, the settings on these things can be global. And so you can make a change in one particular script and it will impact the whole system.

And you may want that, or you may not want that. And so knowing how to sort of isolate changes that you make to not impact other areas is really important. And getting that all dialed in properly. So it’s not crashing and you’re not smashing tips and things like that.

Andrew Lee: Ah, experienced multiple of those situations and, you want to avoid it as much as you can. But, each of those failures again is a learning experience and, what not to do. Right.

Mike Mueller: Absolutely. And the hardware is pretty robust, so it can usually take a pretty decent beating, before the service engineer would have to come out for it. So,

Andrew Lee: That’s good to [00:27:00] know. And that’s on the TECAN side. Right. I mean, that’s on the FLUENT’s .

Mike Mueller: Yeah.

Andrew Lee: So I’m kind of coming to wrap things up here and really the key takeaway, some of the key points that you mentioned as you were going through your career path is this creative solution or this creative problem solving everybody kind of raises that cliche line.

I’m thinking outside the box. But in order to think outside the box, you really need to know what’s within all of the parameters of the programming and you need to experience a lot of that programming settings. Then you can actually build upon it to expand further on. And you mentioned a lot of other experiences, but really any other key points, suggestions for the listeners, whether they might be a future customer of yours or ours, or future automation programmers.

Again, the audience might have different interests on their future trajectory, but, just in general. Sort of concepts about the automated liquid handlers.

Mike Mueller: Yeah, I think, there’s definitely a [00:28:00] process, to bring all these, workflows online and there’s sort of a right way and a wrong way to do it, efficient way to do it or inefficient way to do it. So it definitely pays to have, if you’re doing it yourself, at least, some sort of guidance or mentor on how to, go about that process.

Or certainly can outsource the work, companies like ourself, as consultants for this type of thing. In your case, you came to us and, you had your workflow and really off the bat, I identified just a couple, potential bottlenecks. I’m like, if we can fix these two things, these are the hurdles we have to overcome, then we can definitely get your process to work.

And so really just focusing on those two items, making sure we could do that, and then I knew that the process is going to work great on the system, and, we’re short order. We had that figured out and, got you guys up and running. So I think, for the listeners out there, if they’re struggling in any way with the liquid handler, they don’t have enough hours in the day to program up next kit or maybe you’ve already got something in place, but you want to make some modifications to it.

Give us a holler, customers we’re working with. They really [00:29:00] like, what we’re doing and they’re coming back to us again and again. So we’d love to work with listeners out there as well. Check out our website, nucleus dash automation. com. We’re fairly active on LinkedIn as well.

So check us out there.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, so I think you’ve got the address nucleus dash automation dot com. And I think the contact us tab is there on the website. If you want to reach out to Mike Mueller and again, he attends a lot of the local laboratory robotics groups. In short, it’s called the laboratory robotics interest groups or LRIG and there’s definitely different regions.

You were up in Wisconsin site recently last week, I think, and then

Mike Mueller: from the Midwest. LRIG

Andrew Lee: And then I think you’re scheduled for another 1. Are you attending the Philadelphia 1?

Mike Mueller: not Philadelphia, but we’re doing New York city,

As well.

Andrew Lee: Yeah, I think we’re doing that one jointly. Uh, for the New York, and then I think we ran into each other, of course, that the big annual event, the SLAS event. And I think we’ll see you [00:30:00] again, quite often, and definitely ongoing collaboration. Not only on the programming side, but also just other add ons that we’re bringing in to IMCS. We’ve been very pleased with all the collaborative efforts. Definitely from nucleus automation.

Mike Mueller: Yeah. And it’s not just myself too. I should mention, I have a colleague who’s also Ex-TECAN Kelly Tracy. She’s very experienced, on the, life scientists side, automation side, she does a great job working with us. So a lot of people. Working with the nucleus will know Kelly as well.

Andrew Lee: Nice, that’s fantastic. So, I hope all of the listeners enjoyed this episode on automated liquid handling and IMCS Tips, a little touch on IMCS Tips with Mike Mueller from Nucleus Automation. Programming a liquid handler isn’t just transferring liquids, as you heard throughout the whole thing. There’s next gen sequencing, there’s ELISAs, there’s chromatography, there’s a whole slew of different solutions.

And the flexibility of an automated liquid handler provides so much opportunities out there to take a [00:31:00] system that’s so robust that you can actually generate consistent processes. However, because of that flexibility, you’re going to have to have someone well experienced to implement those things. And it sounds like there’s a lot of people out there who are interested, but do not have the time or the expertise and reaching out to Mike Mueller would be a great, great opportunity. For IMCS, we’ve been able to trick the system to thinking that we’re pipetting liquids into things that shouldn’t be pipetted into, but you can still do it. So these are examples of how robust the system is, and the playful things that you can do to really think outside the box and put it inside the tip instead of into a microplate.