A Standardization in Laboratory Automation-Based Open Software Architecture for Integration and Control of High-Throughput Nucleic Acid Sample Processing Systems

摘要

Integrated laboratory automation systems have been widely used for high-throughput biological sample preparation and analysis. However, it is difficult to integrate different devices on a common automation platform due to their different interfaces and physical characteristics. In this work, we proposed an open software architecture based on SiLA (Standardization in Laboratory Automation) standard for integration and control of different hardware for high-throughput nucleic acid sample processing. To better define system configuration and track system behavior, we further developed a 3-D visualization modeling tool for system configuration and workflow setting. Using the proposed software architecture, we performed two high-throughput automated nucleic acid extraction experiments through our developed laboratory automation platform where one of the experiment workflows was scheduled by a genetic algorithm (GA) based optimization method. The experimental results showed that the software architecture proposed in this paper can more flexibly help to implement optimized scheduling and control of automation workflow.