ROBOTIC AUTOMATION OF DIDEOXYRIBONUCLEOTIDE SEQUENCING REACTIONS

We developed a robot to carry out standard Sanger dideoxyribonucleotid e sequencing reactions efficiently and with minimal human intervention . A commercial robot was adapted to our design and specifications, and we programmed it to perform up to 240 sequencing reactions in a singl e unattended run of 7 h. The robot configuration can be easily altered to allow 480 reactions to be performed in an unattended run of 14 h. The special features of our robot include cooled reagent reservoirs an d cooled chambers for storage of DNA templates and completed reactions as well as reproducible aspiration of small volumes by using a sensin g algorithm. The robot has successfully performed over 3500 DNA reacti ons in about 30 separate runs in our DNA core facility.