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Thanks for taking a look at our stuff and taking the time to comment. As I said below, we have shipped 51 robots so far and most are in daily use by the academic research labs and biotech companies that bought them. Serial dilutions, mother daughter plating, ELISA, PCR prep, ligations/digestions, heat shock transformations, and soon Gibson assembly are the applications most widely run on the OT-One. Yes we do depress the top of the manual pipette, just like you would do by hand. Do you trust your manual pipetting to be reproducible? Thats exactly the same thing that is happening here. Agreed we need a dye test to show reproducibility/precision/accuracy, and it is currently in the works (you can find a scale test showing accuracy/precision on our blog, blog.opentrons.com). But from running the machine for 6 months and getting good biological data on it, I can tell you that it reliably hits the desired volume when correctly calibrated. And it can hit different volumes each transfer w/o setting the pipette, it just presses the plunger down the desired amount (say you want 100ul using a p200, it pushes down 50%). The electronic pipettes you are talking about cost more than our whole robot. Our current users disagree with you that we need to be faster than a grad student, thought when turned up to full speed it is faster (but needs to be bolted to the bench when you turn it up that fast). In fact, the grad students that use the machine love it because they can go do other things and not worry about errors in their pipetting. Also, the PRO version of the OT-One can hold a single and an 8-channel pipette at the same time. Users can choose a p1000, p200, or p10, and we can consistently transfer 1ul of liquid fusing both single and multi-channel p10. Actually, most of our users do already have liquid handling robots when they buy an OT-One, and our machine is often labs' first form of automation. Users like this have had lots of success porting their manual protocols onto the OT-One, and you can see the different choices already available for users to download and run on Mix.Bio. I agree we could use a lot more info on our website, and we are working on it. Till then, happy to talk more details if your interested, just email info@opentrons.com and we can set up a time to talk. Thanks! Will |