Page 11 - ME Newsletter Spring

innovative faculty innovative faculty SUHASA KODANDARAMAIAH |
Objective Biotechnology
Suhasa Kodandaramaiah, along with
two members of his lab group, Andrew Alegria and Daniel Surinach, successfully commercialized a robotic microinjection technology that Alegria developed in his PhD work. Alegria recently traveled to Baylor
College of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute research campus to install the first commercial versions of their autoinjector.
The idea behind the project
was to develop an automated microinjection robot to eliminate the bottleneck that manual microinjection causes in genome manipulation experiments. Microinjection is very critical to these experiments because it allows researchers to inject any kind of solution into an organism, such as a fruit fly embryo, and then alter that organism’s genome.
“The problem with manual microinjection is that it is a very laborious procedure that only highly-skilled technicians can do which really limits the scale at which microinjection could be done, which in turn limits our ability to learn more interesting science,” said Alegria. “We used computer vision and machine learning tools in combination with off the shelf optics components to automate the entire microinjection.”
To demonstrate the robots’ ability to do large scale experiments, the team performed an experiment where they microinjected 20,000 fruit fly embryos, a scale that would not be possible via manual microinjection. Alegria’s goal for Objective Biotechnology is to “disseminate the robot to as many labs and institutions as possible and expand it to inject a wide variety of organisms such as aphid eggs, black soldier fly embryos, carp eggs, and potentially automate IVF injections.”
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Andrew Alegria works on Objective Biotechnology’s microinjection technique.