How can we better engage with industry and instrument vendors? How much do they care about our needs? How can we organize better as a community to encourage this bi-directional communication?
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One idea that evolved around sample transfer and standard formats during a discussion today:
Multiple groups/labs send a common sample from their lab (i.e., physically wrap up and send via mail) to a single site where there is one or a few different robotic arms. Tools built in isolation tend to stay in isolation – having an array of different sample types from real laboratory settings would help with generalizability and standardization. I liked what @ryanlewis brought up referencing a Plugtest - Wikipedia.
To lay some groundwork for this, I’d be curious to collect some informal data on what kinds of standards/formats people are using for samples in their labs.
ANSI/SLAS Microplate Standards seems to be fairly dominant in the liquidhandling/aqueous biology labs; are there similar standards for other domains, or is it more ad hoc? What are people using in their labs?
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For our part:
- Both our biology SDLs are entirely standardized around ANSI/SLAS microplates
- Our Glovebox SDL is also ANSI/SLAS microplates
- Our RAPID-200 chemistry lab currently mostly uses these stackable 90-tube sample racks: https://shop.perkinelmer.com/product/N0830027. As far as I know, there’s not any uniform standard or specification for tube racks like these, though there are tube racks out there that are ANSI/SLAS compatible.
- And in the same setup, the Fourier NMR we have takes a completely different sample holder, naturally. I think this one might be proprietary to PAL/Bruker.
- In both cases, the proprietary sample holders are the form factor used by the measurement/characterization instrument, and we’ve had to design the lab around them.
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