title: Wet Lab Accelerator: A Web-Based Application Democratizing Laboratory Automation for Synthetic Biology.
abstract: Wet Lab Accelerator (WLA) is a cloud-based tool that allows a scientist to conduct biology via robotic control without the need for any programming knowledge. A drag and drop interface provides a convenient and user-friendly method of generating biological protocols. Graphically developed protocols are turned into programmatic instruction lists required to conduct experiments at the cloud laboratory Transcriptic. Prior to the development of WLA, biologists were required to write in a programming language called "Autoprotocol" in order to work with Transcriptic. WLA relies on a new abstraction layer we call "Omniprotocol" to convert the graphical experimental description into lower level Autoprotocol language, which then directs robots at Transcriptic. While WLA has only been tested at Transcriptic, the conversion of graphically laid out experimental steps into Autoprotocol is generic, allowing extension of WLA into other cloud laboratories in the future. WLA hopes to democratize biology by bringing automation to general biologists.
authors.affiliation: BioNano Research Group, Autodesk Research , San Francisco, California 94111, United States.
authors.forename: Maxwell
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bates
authors.affiliation: BioNano Research Group, Autodesk Research , San Francisco, California 94111, United States.
authors.forename: Aaron J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Berliner
authors.affiliation: BioNano Research Group, Autodesk Research , San Francisco, California 94111, United States.
authors.forename: Joe
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lachoff
authors.affiliation: BioNano Research Group, Autodesk Research , San Francisco, California 94111, United States.|Department of Chemistry & Biomolecular Sciences, Macquarie University , Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia.
authors.forename: Paul R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Jaschke
authors.affiliation: BioNano Research Group, Autodesk Research , San Francisco, California 94111, United States.
authors.forename: Eli S
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Groban
mesh_terms: D057205:Automation, Laboratory / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D000067917:Cloud Computing; D003196:Computer Graphics; D020407:Internet; D011381:Programming Languages; D012371:Robotics; D012984:Software; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
keywords: automation; autoprotocol; cloud-lab; democratization; scientific reproducibility; standardization; synthetic biology