Talk:SynBERC:COG

QiaCube
The Knight lab did a 1 day evaluation of the QiaCube.

Here are some observations and results...


 * 1) The yield from a 5mL LB culture prep of pUC19 was 80-85 ng/&mu;L using the default QiaPrep Miniprep protocol with an single elution volume of 50 &mu;L.
 * 2) The yield from an 8mL LB culture prep of pSB3T5-I52001 (p15A origin) was 30 ng/&mu;L using the default QiaPrep Miniprep protocol with an single elution volume of 50 &mu;L.
 * 3) The yields from 8mL LB culture preps of pSB4K5 (with two different inserts, multiple colonies) were 6ng/&mu;L, 11ng/&mu;L, 14ng/&mu;L, 18ng/&mu;L, 21ng/&mu;L, 29ng/&mu;L using the low copy QiaPrep Miniprep protocol with a single elution volume of 30 &mu;L. I am not sure why I saw such a high variance ... the cell pellets seemed to be approximately the same size.
 * 4) It costs about $0.13 per sample in additional plastic (beyond the kit itself).
 * 5) A miniprep of 8 samples takes about 50 minutes, 12 samples takes about 58 minutes.
 * 6) 12 sample max

Advantages

 * 1) Standardization
 * 2) Save time by not doing the prep yourself

Disadvantages

 * 1) Currently the minimum elution volume for a double elution is 50 &mu;L for each elution (this may be fixable). The minimum elution volume for a single elution is 30 &mu;L.
 * 2) Each new protocol variant costs $400 and has a 10 day turnaround time (potentially addressable). Totally new protocols may cost more and take more time.
 * 3) You can't heat the elution buffer (which can improve yield).
 * 4) The robot is incapable of reloading flow through onto a column a second time (useful for low copy minipreps).
 * 5) You can't save copies of existing protocols with different settings.

Outstanding issues

 * 1) Could we go directly from a miniprep to a digestion step using this robot? This would definitely require a custom protocol but it is not clear that the robot can do this.