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Tutorial - Rack Replication

Introduction

In this tutorial, you will create two copies of five 96-vial racks (100 μL – 10 mM). The resulting vials will each have a volume of 30 μL and will be diluted by a factor of 10 (resulting in 30 μL – 1 mM).

Example of rack replication workflow

Prerequisites

Required permissions and setup

Sample Processing role is required to access this workflow.

Required system configuration:

  • Location Type Rack with Rack Mask(s): 96 and 384 (if you want to create a 384 well tube rack),
  • Container Usage Inventory,
  • Solvent DMSO,
  • Worklist Generator and Parser: Standard (Container) (;)

These should exist by default in the Sample application.

Items

Racks from Discngine Sample’s automation will be used:

  • 5 racks 96 (100 uL – 10 mM). Layout with columns 1 and 12 as empty,
  • Location Paris > HTS Lab > Freezer1 Automation is running during installation if “example_dataset” is set to true in the configuration file.

Workflow

Job Initialization

Create a new job and select the Rack Replication workflow.

Requesting

  • Select Rack as Source Type
  • Choose Target Rack Barcode as Generate New Barcode
  • Select 96 (8x12) as the Target Rack Type
  • Specify Request from Text
  • Copy and paste the rack names in the text area: R00020:R00019:R00018:R00017:R00016 Rack names can be separated by colons or line breaks.
  • Click Add IDs to confirm. The racks are listed in the added requests.
  • Click Next.

Task Requesting

  • Choose Source Selection Mode: All sources
  • Target Usage: Inventory
  • Select Number of Copy: 2
  • Target Volume: 30 μL
  • Dilution: Target
  • Dilution Mode: Dilution Factor
  • Dilution Factor: 10
  • Buffer (Solvent): DMSO
  • Offset Volume: 0 %
  • Offset Solvent: 0 %
  • Click Add Task. Two tasks are added (one for each copy).
  • Click Next.

Sourcing

The Sourcing page will confirm that the requested operations are compatible with the source racks (see the Sourced column).

  • Click Next.

Processing

For processing, requested tasks are translated into a worklist that you can feed to your robotic equipment.

  • Select the Standard (Container) (;) equipment and set File Order to By Request.
  • Click Generate worklist.

A worklist file appears in the Worklist Generator area. It contains the requested tasks to execute. The Worklist Parser area expects a file containing information about the tasks that were actually completed. By default, the generated file is set in the Worklist Parser. For this tutorial, we assume that every task was completed successfully, so we’ll keep this default file.

  • Click Copy Worklist.
  • Click Next to propagate these changes in the system.

The tasks are processed in the Sample application.

Storing

The Storing step allows you to assign a location to the items involved in the job. First, for the output racks (racks created during the job):

  • Click Assign Location to Selected.
  • Select Paris > HTS Lab > Freezer1 and click Select to confirm your choice.
  • Click Next to continue to the input racks. Here, we won’t change the input racks' location.
  • Click Next.

You can increment the Thawing Cycle count of the input racks if necessary.

Pipe & Close

The Pipe & Close step provides a summary page where you can review the job and optionally pipe it to another workflow. You can also pipe this job to another one, allowing you to immediately start a new job using the output or the input racks from this one.

For this tutorial, click Close & Quit to finish the job.