Automated Cell Culture System

This page and sub-pages contain information and links about the automated, microfluidics-based cell culture system described in:

Gomez-Sjoberg, R., Leyrat, A.A., Pirone, D.M., Chen, C.S. & Quake, S.R., "Versatile Fully Automated, Microfluidic Cell Culture System." Analytical Chemistry 79, 8557-8563 (2007).

R. Gómez-Sjöberg and A. Leyrat built two identical cell culture systems in the Quake Lab at Stanford that are still in use. The design of the system was greatly improved by R. Gómez-Sjöberg when he moved to LBNL (and built a new version here), and has continued to evolve over the years, so the design presented here is substantially different in implementation (but not in architecture) to the systems built in the Quake Lab. The newest incarnation of the system improves many aspects of its operation, greatly simplifying the setup of an experiment and increasing the reliability of the chip control hardware.

The system is built around a fully automated Leica DMI6000B epi-fluorescence microscope with an incubation chamber, but it can be adapted to any microscope, even one without full automation (but you will obviously loose most of the advantage of a fully automated setup). The chip & experiment control software provided here only works with the Leica microscope, but anybody with Matlab programming experience can change the software to use a different microscope, either by writing microscope-specific code from scratch (with the Zeiss MTB2004 SDK, for example), or using µManager.

Contributing

You are encouraged to leave comments at the bottom of each page, if you have questions about the construction, setup, and use of the automated cell culture system, and especially if you have suggestions on how to improve things. If you have information that could be relevant to other people using the automated culture system, or doing microfluidic cell culture in general, put the information in a comment inside the relevant sub-page, and I will incorporate it into the page.