Laboratory Automation Facility

The Laboratory Automation Facility (LAF) is a central research and service platform at ETH's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), located in Basel. The LAF is specialized in the development and integration of experimental protocols and lab routines on robotic systems to enable faster, more robust and more reproducible workflows in molecular biology, biochemistry and microbial cultivation. The benefits of using such a technology to automate workflows in biology are mainly the increase of throughput and reliability of highly standardized machine-operated protocols by elimination of variability due to human interference. The LAF currently runs several automatized liquid handling systems from the major supplier Tecan, Hamilton and Agilent, which serve as platforms for routines of molecular biology and biochemical assays as well as for the automated cultivation of mammalian cell lines.