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.
