• Question: do you use a lot of robots in your research?

    Asked by henryjones to Clare, Mariana, Pedro, Robert, Susanne on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Mariana Campos

      Mariana Campos answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      I don’t use robots, I am not so cool! But I use very big microscopes, with lots of buttons! And I use other machines! Sometimes I wish I could have a robot to put all my flies into new tubes with new food. I have so many that it takes solo long! That’s what I am doing now! 🙂

    • Photo: Susanne Muekusch

      Susanne Muekusch answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      hi henry,

      I use fancy machines, like a FACS sorter. I am not quite sure when something stops being a machine and is called a robot. The FACS sorts my cells in different test tubes- one type of cells in one test tube, the other in another test tube. It does this at a speed of sorting 3,000 cells per second!

      Does that count? 🙂

    • Photo: Clare Taylor

      Clare Taylor answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Er no, not unless you call my PhD students robots! And I try very hard to programme them to do things properly!

      Robots are really, really, really expensive so a lab like mine couldn’t afford to buy one! Like Robert though, we also use lots of machines which can do amazing things! One of my favourites is the ultracentrifuge that can spin samples at 120,000 revolutions per minute. Can you imagine how fast that is?? It spins round 2000 times every second! It goes so fast, it has to be done in a vacuum so that there is no friction and so that it doesn’t catch fire!

    • Photo: Robert Insall

      Robert Insall answered on 18 Nov 2012:

      Henry,
      Yes! We do! But they’re really, really boring robots. They do liquid handling and move stuff from plate to plate. They emphatically do not do anything interesting, dominate the world, or play at being God. Only we get to do that 🙂
      The coolest one – by FAR – is one that’s used for X-ray crystallography. It tests out loads of different conditions to see which ones are the best for making crystals. It makes the mixtures, dilutes out the proteins, then takes a picture every day to see how the crystals are growing – 10,000 times over!

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