The LRIG Global Newsletter — November 2025 Edition Is Live!
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Our newsletter connects and inspires the lab automation community:
• A deep dive into “The Art of Laboratory Automation in the Age of AI”
• Member & Volunteer Spotlights
• Upcoming Events Across LRIG Chapters

We’re excited to share the latest updates, insights, and opportunities from across our LRIG community. From upcoming events to inspiring member stories, this Summer 2025 newsletter highlights what’s new and what’s next.

Check it out and stay connected with us!

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On April 17 eMolecules will be attending the MidWest @lrig.org 2025 Spring Conference, an event where science exchanges ideas in the discovery and application of new techniques and technologies in life science research. We’d love to meet you there!

👉 More info or to register via LRIGMidWest.org

International Lab Automation Day is June 21!

Automation is transforming science.

Celebrate the impact of lab automation by sharing your story.

labautomationday.lrig.org

This is how:
Post your lab setup
Share what automation has done for you
Use #LabAutomationDay to be featured in our news!

Opinion | Why Did Elon Musk Go After Bunkers Full of Seeds? (Gift Article) Gene banks are like a survivalist cache: our nation’s safeguard against all future challenges to growing the food we need.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/o...
#biobanking #biorepository #labautomation #lrig #agbio

How Fungi Move Among Us (Gift Article) Underground fungal networks are “living algorithms” that quietly help regulate Earth’s climate. Now scientists know what makes them so efficient.

Great article on Fungi Networks, including a video of a robotic system for monitoring the growth patterns

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/s...

#LRIG #LabAutomation #LaboratoryAutomation #LaboratoryRobotics #LabRobotics #LabRobot #Automation #Fungi

Customer stories - Teselagen Learn how Arzeda leveraged technology from TeselaGen, Labcyte and Twist Bioscience to accelerate their synthetic biology workflow and build a better DNA

Learn how @arzeda.bsky.social leveraged technology from TeselaGen, Labcyte and @twistbioscience.com to accelerate their synthetic biology workflow and build a better DNA assembly line: teselagen.com/customer-sto... #biosky #synbio #biotech #bioeconomy #biotechnology

On a Mission to Heal Gila Monsters (Gift Article) After years in Big Pharma, a chemist pivoted to help save the species that made Ozempic possible.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/s...

Does anyone have experience with low-input high-throughput (96 well plate) RNAseq library preparation from plants (bonus points if it is with plant roots...)

Drug Company to Share Revenues With Indigenous People Who Donated Their Genes (Gift Article) Variant Bio, a small biotech company based in Seattle, is using genetic information from Indigenous people to develop drugs for obesity and diabetes.

Drug Company to Share Revenues With Indigenous People Who Donated Their Genes

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/h...

#Biobanking #Biospecimen #Biorepository #Biobank #Biopreservation #SampleManagement

Development of a high-throughput platform for quantitation of histone modifications on a new QTOF instrument Histone post-translational modifications (PTMs) regulate gene expression patterns through epigenetic mechanisms. The 5 histone proteins (H1, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4) are extensively modified, with over 75 distinct modification types spanning more than 200 sites. Despite strong advances in mass spectrometry-based approaches, identification and quantification of modified histone peptides remains challenging due to factors such as isobaric peptides, pseudo-isobaric PTMs, and low stoichiometry of certain marks.

Our lab's latest manuscript led by Emily Zahn to develop a high-throughput approach for quantification of histone PTMs is out in MCP. Come read how you can use rapid and short 10 and even 5 min gradients and still get high quality data on the Sciex 7600 ZenoTOF.
www.mcponline.org/article/S153...

A Woman With a Rare Gene Mutation Fights to Avoid Her Mother’s Fate (Gift Article) A mutant gene is coming to steal Linde Jacobs’s mind. Can she find a way to stop it?

An amazing, inspiring story about fighting FTD, #CRISPR, and a new cell line.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/h...

Where are they now? | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Research is itself an educational activity. With the laws of science and nature for teachers, researchers conduct experiments to learn how life and the world work. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL)...

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL): Where are they now?
~ celebrating our colleague Cathy Seiler, among others ~

Using new technology to explore the tiniest of worlds Complex microbiomes are everywhere. Our skin, our guts, soil, pond water. All are home to tiny life forms, interacting with each other and going about their business.

In our new article, we catch up with PhD researcher @yashbancil.bsky.social about his work developing high-throughput #singlecell #microbial workflows for unravelling the genomic and functional complexities of complex #microbiomes. 🦠🧪

www.earlham.ac.uk/articles/usi...

@atrandi.bsky.social

Sustainable sequencing in the new MiSeq i100 Series How Illumina’s Erin Imsand and her team helped develop reagents that can be stored at room temperature

How Illumina’s Erin Imsand and her team helped develop MiSeq i100 Series reagents that can be stored at room temperature - both more sustainable and expanding where in the world sequencing can be done without a cold-chain
www.illumina.com/company/news...

Meet the Plant Hacker Creating Flowers Never Seen (or Smelled) Before Biotechnologist Sebastian Cocioba started hacking plants to put himself through college. Now, from his home lab on Long Island, he wants to bring the tools of genetic engineering to the masses.

A little profile of @atinygreencell.bsky.social's work creating plants you've never seen or smelled before

(and also trying to democratise science along the way)

www.wired.com/story/meet-t...

The company is one of the players in the newly shaped #techbio sector, or what it's been referred to as "self-driving labs" setups. A lot of high-throughput phenotyping, a powerful AI-enabled image analysis system (partnership with Nvidia $NVDA), and a small molecule drug discovery platform.

When you check on your cell culture after the weekend

Phase contrast microscopy image showing the chloroplast morphology of siphonous green algae.

An optimized CTAB method for genomic DNA extraction from green seaweeds (Ulvophyceae)

New in #AppsPlantSci by Hossen, Courtney, Bringloe, et al

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #botany #Ulvophyceae #GreenSeaweed #DNAExtraction #iamabotanist

#LabAutomation community, any thoughts on the recent @benchling tech report? My biggest takeaway was the significant drop in investment sentiment from 2023 to 2024. Thoughts on why this is?

We’re excited and ready to engage with
Every scientist, chemist, researcher, lab manager, And R&D decision maker!

#ChemSky #MaterialsScience #LabDigitalization #LabAutomation

Comparing the effectiveness of different DNA extraction methods in MX‐80 bentonite We conducted an inter-laboratory comparison of two slightly modified DNA extraction methods on sterilized Wyoming MX-80 bentonite, amended with two defined mock communities. The choice between the tw...

Comparing the effectiveness of different DNA extraction methods in MX‐80 bentonite enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #jcampubs

Any European Lab Automation enthusiasts in here? How do you see the market evolving?
#labautomation

High-throughput expansion microscopy enables scalable super-resolution imaging A simple and accessible method for high-throughput super-resolution fluorescence microscopy that is compatible with commonly used staining practices, 96-well cell culture plates, and confocal…

High-throughput expansion microscopy enables scalable super-resolution imaging

Low-cost protein extracts and hydrolysates from plant-based agro-industrial waste: Inputs of interest for cultured meat The main challenge in large-scale cultured meat production is replacing fetal bovine serum (FBS), an expensive, animal-derived component in the cell c…

Hydrolysates from soy/peanut sidestreams can support cell culture

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Plant-based hydrolysates as building blocks for cellular agriculture Cellular agriculture, an emerging technology, aims to produce animal-based products such as meat through scalable tissue culture methods. Traditional …

Hydrolysates from animal feed pellets support cell culture

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congrats to our 2024 research grant program cohort, who will explore how starting materials ranging from crops, sidestreams, microbes, and micro/macro algae can support cellular nutrition for #cultivatedmeat production.

gfi.org/blog/buildin...

Does anyone have strong opinions on what the best/most sensitive low volume spectrophotometer is? Looking to quantify low concentrations of fluorescently labelled protein, not just DNA etc

#biochem #biophys #singlemolecule

Landmark genetics partnership to probe causes of cancer and dementia Oxford Nanopore’s breakthrough genetic sequencing tech to analyse 50,000 samples from UK Biobank, to create a world-first ‘epigenetic map’.

New collaboration announced between Oxford Nanopore and UK Biobank to create world-first ‘epigenetic map’.

MicrobesNG is proud to be a a Nanopore Certified Service provider, and offers end-end support through from DNA extraction to sequencing and analysis.

www.gov.uk/government/n...

Hi! I'm Oliver, I'm a PhD student studying Bioinformatics. I have ADHD & autism, ankylosing spondylitis, essential tremor. They played a role in my decision to switch from wet lab microbiology to genomics! Even with a mild tremor pipetting for PCR is very hard 😂