Abstract

LegoRoboBricks for Automated BioBrick Assembly Commercial Liquid Handling Systems are extremely expensive, and are typically beyond the reach of the average molecular biologist interested in performing high throughput methods. To address this problem, our project consists of the design and implementation of a liquid handling system built from commonly accessible Legos. We demonstrate a proof-of-principle use for this system to perform BioBrick assembly by transferring colored dye solutions on a 96-well plate. We introduce a new concept called LegoRoboBrick. The liquid handling system is build by designing and implementing 3 LegoRoboBrick modular components: ALPHA (Automated Lego Pipette Head Assembly), BETA (BioBrick Environmental Testing Apparatus), and PHI (Pneumatic Handling Interface). We will demonstrate that the same BioBrick assembly software can run on multiple plug-and-play LegoRoboBrick instances with different physical dimensions and geometric configurations. The modular design of LegoRoboBricks allows easy extension of new laboratory functionalities in the future.