Colony screening scale up idea

 

The core of my research group was fully automated iBioFab, and I have been thinking if I can contribute by automating the imprint-based colony screening workflow.  

I think the way to do this is developing a single box (robot) that contains all automations needed to perform sample preparation for the imprint based colony screening. Basically if a petri dish is put into the box by the robotic arm of the iBioFab, it will spit out 1) MALDI plate with the imprinted and matrix-coated colonies and the 2)geometry file for targeting the colonies by MALDI-MS.  

I feel if you can get me a mechanical engineering student collaborator, I can develop it in 6 months because I have all other skills needed like electronics/controls/programming that I gained from my MS work. Also, I have the mature colony screening protocol (+macroMS) that is ready to be automated. The MALDI-MS part is still off-line but large part of Test theme work is for developing towards fully automated iBioFab.

My idea for the machine is the following. I believe this can be packed into a box in an ibioFab.

Idea for making boring homeworks a little more fun

 

As a grad student, I used to be a TA for a laboratory class, and I remembered I absolutely hated lab courses when I was an undergrad student. They were just not my thing. (Ironically, I love my laboratory work now). I hated writing lab reports also. I think I still hate lab courses.

I gave a thought about how to make writing lab reports a little bit more attractive or bearable. After getting permission from the senior TA, I sent a group email to the class that we are adding an optional section for the lab report, where the student can put in anything they want. Jokes,hobby,investigation, invention, scribble, etc. Obviously the optional section cannot impact the grade structure, so I told them that I would never deduct points for things written in this section, and I said I would reward my personal favorite with a large bag of KitKat.

The responses I got for this section was amazing. I saw lots of jokes, but someone put a photo of buckyball (C60 Fullerene, photo shown below) that was made out of origami that she made. So I gladly gave the person a large bag of KitKat.

This is an alternative way to make a homework fun.