Building automation around biology: From zebrafish to organoids
Experimental biology has become extraordinarily sophisticated, yet many of its everyday workflows still rely on surprisingly manual routines: handling, imaging, sorting and selecting biological samples one by one. These steps are often difficult to standardize and can vary from one operator to another. Automating them, however, is not simply a matter of replacing a person with a machine.
At Bionomous, we work with heterogeneous biological samples and with researchers whose experiments rarely follow a single fixed workflow. Using examples from zebrafish and our growing work with systems such as organoids, I will explore what it takes to make automation useful in real laboratory practice: making repetitive steps more consistent and traceable without taking biological judgement away from the researcher.
Ultimately, the question is not how to make biology fit automation, but how automation can adapt to biology while helping research become more standardized.
