This was a project (done while an employee) for a small biotech client who produced arrays of yeast colonies on agar plates.  We designed a pin-transfer tool to pick up yeast from liquid cultures in 96-well plates and spot them onto the agar growth plates.  A Hamilton robot was programmed to spot yeast from 16 source plates onto each output plate, with each transfer being offset by 2.25mm, resulting in arrays with 1536 unique yeast colonies.

The steps we executed include:

• Conceptualized and designed the pin transfer tool

• Worked with a local machine shop to produce the necessary parts

• Wrote low-level programming code for Hamilton to produce the yeast arrays