A LC-MS integration approach in life science automation: Hardware integration and software integration

Robots are widely used in life science automation due to their advantages, such as reducing manpower, ensuring uniformity and eliminating contaminations. Single-arm robots, with multiple degrees of freedom, have been used to transport labware, e.g. transporting microplates. Nowadays dual-arm robots draw much attraction due to their flexibility, but their applications in life sciences are still limited. In this case, a platform based on a Yaskawa CSDA10F dual-arm robot has been realized in the Center for Life Science Automation (celisca), Germany. In this platform, the robot is not only used to prepare samples by using labware, including pipettes, glass vials, microplates, thermoshaker and so on, in a human-like way, but also employed to integrate a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry instrument (LC-MS) to the platform for sample analysis purposes. In order to enhance the degree of automation, the analysis process needs to be started automatically after the prepared samples are fed to the LC-MS. This was achieved by integrating the software system of the LC-MS to the SAMI Workstation EX Software system (SAMI EX, Beckman Coulter Inc.), which is user friendly and used for process scheduling. The integration was realized based on the user interface and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The LC-MS can be controlled by imitating the signals of mouse events and keystrokes to the user interface (such as starting or stopping analysis process); XML data is used for detailed control information.