Advancing Reproducible Science through Open Source Laboratory Protocols as Software

Hello everyone!

My name is Luiza, I am an eighth-semester Bsc Biological Sciences student from São Paulo, Brazil. As part of the LabOp working group, my proposal under the mentorship of Dan Bryce and Tim Fallon aims to build a conversor that takes normal laboratory protocols and translates them into machine executable protocols. This is possible thanks to LabOP’s versatility to represent what a Laboratory protocol should look like. I´ll be testing this specialization in Hamilton machines that are great for experimenting scalling up.

Nowadays we face a very common issue between Biotechnology laboratories, that is that protocols are difficult to share and to adapt for machine execution. Laboratory protocols are critical to biological research and development, yet complicated to communicate and reproduce across projects, investigators, and organizations. While many attempts have been made to address this challenge, there is currently no available protocol representation that is unambiguous enough for precise interpretation and automation, yet simultaneously abstract enough to enable reuse and adaptation.

With LabOP we can take a protocol and convert it in multiple ways depending on the needs of the researcher for automation or human experimentation and allowing flexibility for execution and experimentation so I`ll be building a specialization that translates protocols in a way that they can be executed by Hamilton machines.