RESUMO
The current throughput of conventional organic chemical synthesis is usually a few experiments for each operator per day. We develop a robotic system for ultra-high-throughput chemical synthesis, online characterization, and large-scale condition screening of photocatalytic reactions, based on the liquid-core waveguide, microfluidic liquid-handling, and artificial intelligence techniques. The system is capable of performing automated reactant mixture preparation, changing, introduction, ultra-fast photocatalytic reactions in seconds, online spectroscopic detection of the reaction product, and screening of different reaction conditions. We apply the system in large-scale screening of 12,000 reaction conditions of a photocatalytic [2 + 2] cycloaddition reaction including multiple continuous and discrete variables, reaching an ultra-high throughput up to 10,000 reaction conditions per day. Based on the data, AI-assisted cross-substrate/photocatalyst prediction is conducted.
RESUMO
On-site nucleic acid testing (NAT) plays an important role for disease monitoring and pathogen diagnosis. In this work, we developed an automated and fully-integrated nucleic acid analyzer by combining the automated liquid handling robot technique with the microfluidic droplet-based real-time PCR assay technique. The present analyzer could achieve multiple operations including sample introduction, nucleic acid extraction based on magnetic solid-phase extraction, reverse transcription and, sample droplet generation, PCR amplification, real-time and dual fluorescence detection of droplet array. A strategy of constructing an integrated compact and low-cost system was adopted to minimize the analyzer size to 50 × 45 × 45 cm (length × width × height), and reduce the instrument cost to ca. $900 with a single analysis cost less than $5. A simple chip was also designed to pre-load reagents and carry oil-covered PCR reaction droplets. We applied the analyzer to identify eight types of influenza pathogens in human throat swabs, and the results were consistent with the colloidal gold method.