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Welcome to the LAF

The Laboratory Automation Facility (LAF) is a central research and service platform at the ETH's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), located in Basel.

The LAF supports the department’s efforts to understand, program and build complex biological systems by miniaturizing and automating complex experimental processes on state-of-the-art robotic systems to gain throughput, speed, robustness and reproducibility. The resulting freedom to scale up experiments enables the investigation of much enlarged parameter spaces and generates deeper insight into the workings of complex systems. To accommodate the great diversity of methods operated at D‑BSSE, the LAF builds up a robust modular workflow library that over time will allow increasingly rapid implementation of novel workflows.

The LAF invests in teaching of master students to familiarize future customers early with the peculiarities of automated workflow development.

The flexible design of our six robotic platforms allows running a vast number of diverse scientific protocols and their interlacing across different platforms. The ongoing growth of the standard and custom workflow library accompanied by well-maintained and continuously developed robotic platforms reflects the dynamics of the research requirements of the department.  

News


Move of LAF to new BSS building

The LAF is part of the Screening@ETH network.

Screening@ETH is a virtual platform comprised of different scientific facilities of the ETH that have in common to provide services and technologies related to arrayed and pooled screening. It provides an overview on the available technologies and infrastructures for genetic and chemical screening campaigns within the ETH. The goal of this association is to provide to scienists a one-stop information access to gain comprehensive support for their screening campaigns.


This collaborative project involves the Zurich-​based ETH technology platforms NEXUS and ScopeM, the Genome Engineering and Measurement Lab (GEML), the Flow Cytometry Core Facility (FCCF), the Virtual Screening Service,  and our Basel-​based D-​BSSE Laboratory Automation Facility (LAF).

 

The members of the virtual Screening@ETH platform.
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