A Modular Liquid Sample Handling Robot for High-Throughput Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

摘要

The identification of food spoilage moulds and other microorganisms by using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is too slow for food industries and laboratories nowadays because of the manual inspection and highly professional needed. While this approach is suitable for small sample numbers, dealing with a large quantity of specimens require FTIR sample preparation to be carried out by a robotic system to increase the throughput but also to avoid cross-contamination. This paper presents a novel modular liquid handling robot to simplify and standardize FTIR sample preparation procedure. It is a single XYZ robot with 5 axes, mainly integrated with a: sonicator, centrifuge, 96-channel liquid dispenses head, washing station and input-output plates. The testing results show that the robot can perform fast, effective and robust biomass sample preparation for FTIR analysis.