CMCI funds were used recently to purchase this ROTOR HDA, high-throughput microbial array pinning robot, to facilitate microbial evolution research on campus.
Quoted by the manufacturer as the fastest and most powerful colony manipulation robot in the world, this machine is indeed ultra-fast and easy to use. The ROTOR HDA is designed for the picking and re-plating of microbial cells and viruses in various size arrays and can operate with cells grown on solid agar or in liquid media. It uses a robotic arm and plastic replica plating pads to pick up samples of cells from culture plates. The robotic arm then moves to a new “target” plate and deposits the cells. Operating the machine simply requires the user to select an appropriate program from a drop-down menu.
So far, the beneficiaries of this purchase are The Rowley Laboratory and the Wichman Lab.