Robots, we haz tehm! #seemyscience
Crystallisation robots at the university of Manchester.
The big blue chap is an Art-Robbins Pheonix - it takes screens from 96 well blocks & dispenses them using a 96-tip head. Then it take your protein in the 'nano-head' and literally fires it on to the screen drops. This means no contact with screen solution and therefore less protocol time spent washing tips.
The second pic is the Mosquito robot. This doesn't pre-dispense screens (you do it with a multi-channel pipette) and gets around cross-contamination issue by having a big drum of disposable mini-tips which are belt-fed onto the dispensing head.
Both can accurately dispense down to about 50 nanolitres and an place protein on plastic with sub-millimeter accuracy.
Vid of the pheonix when I have a WiFi connection.
