Final Design
Here we will share our progress on the journey toward sustainability!
For the past 2 years, Mason and Cameron have been working under Dr. Wright and John with the Opentrons OT-2 Robot. Together, they have developed a plethora of protocols to automate complex lab procedures like Gibson Assembly and In Vivo Assembly (IVA) Cloning.
You may be asking...
What is the Opentrons OT-2?
The Opentrons OT-2 Liquid Handling Robot is capable of running many different lab procedures using its Python-Based API
By developing scripts like this one, we can automate all types of lab procedures with high efficiency and accuracy.
In August of 2022, Sam, Cam, and Mason teamed up to become Team Clean! With their sights set on reducing plastic waste, they got to work on their preliminary research. Their first major assignment was the Tech Review; a deep dive into the existing technology.
While Sam and Mason researched existing patents for decontaminating solutions and determined potential cost-effective alternatives, Cameron was busy in the lab testing out our ideas.
Liquid culture plating of e. coli using a fresh pipette tip (left) and a cleaned pipette tip (right)
10X dilution series of e. coli culture using a cleaned pipette tipÂ
For a decontaminating solution to be useful, we need it to both thoroughly clean the plasticware and not impact later experiments. To do this, Cam has been testing cell counts with virgin plastic compared to plastic cleaned with our solution.
After many iterations to find an effective decontaminating solution, we developed this procedure. The pipette tip first aspirates and dispenses a mixture of 1% bleach and 0.2 M baking soda. To neutralize the corrosive effects of the bleach, the pipette then aspirates 3% hydrogen peroxide. This is then followed by a rinse in deionized water.
We first conducted a qualitative proof-of-concept seen to the right. A tip was first cleaned with our protocol. It was then used to inoculate an agar plate with a strain of E. coli that contains colorful chromoproteins. This tip was then cleaned again and used to plate just the culture medium. This proves that our cleaning solution worked as no colonies showed up. The same tip was then used to plate another strain of a different colored E. Coli. This proves that our tip is thoroughly rinsed and has no effect on further experiments.
This experiment was then conducted 3 more times. The cell counts were counted by hand and their results are displayed on the graph compared to the colony counts of fresh virgin tips. After conducting statistical analysis, we can state that our data shows no indication of a significant impact on downstream experiments. This is great news! This means each pipette tip can at least be used 4 times. instead of once.
