Opentrons

“The invention of the Protocol Designer was a godsend.”

“Enter the Opentrons pipetting robot. For a relatively modest investment, I’ve gotten the students to focus on the pharmacology: how to set up treatment, how they’re treating the cells, and how to analyze and interpret the data that comes out of it. There are many steps where the OT-2 can help. It frees them from the actual mechanical manipulation–and the related anxiety.”

“I really enjoy what I do. We’re having fun with the OT-2.”

“The OT-2 allows students to spend more time on the robot and more time troubleshooting in the lab than doing busywork.”

“The Opentrons software was also open , and we like open practices.”

“The price point of the OT-2 makes it more accessible to teaching labs than other lab automation options.”

“The openness, and ability to integrate with multiple platforms, is a really important feature of your product.”

“It is fair to say that the OT-2 slid seamlessly into our workflow. It eased the work of generating binding curves, which require that you make titrations of dilutions and requires a lot of pipetting. To leave that to a robot rather than take up a technician’s time fits in well with our system, as well as other automated wet lab systems. It is an end-to-end automated workflow.”

“We found that depending on the firmware version of the Opentrons App the initial calibration could be a bit challenging. But the customer support was always instant. We think it is a phenomenal device, extremely smooth, and we love it.”

“For us, the OT-2 is very comfortable. The great thing about the OT-2 is that it allows you at least three ways to interact with it: through the Jupyter notebooks, SSH shell, and the Opentrons Python API . The really great thing is that the protocol runs on the robot, not on the computer, so if the computer disconnects from the robot or something fails, the robot continues to run the protocol.”

“There is absolutely no doubt about it: Opentrons opens the universe for us.”

“The OT-2 and Opentrons have been a big inspiration for us. The way the company has disrupted the liquid handling market is how we want to disrupt the autostaining market. Most labs don’t have liquid handlers precisely because they’re out of the budget range, and they’re complicated and hard to use, but that’s not our experience with the OT-2.”

“All that said, I think the robot has been very helpful. A lot of people think you have to suffer in the lab, but I disagree. I worked in many labs, with different funding, and often I had to do things manually. It was really good for me to learn principles. But as technologies and processes develop, science gets easier and problems like this become less tedious.”

“It is going to make our lives so much easier. For expert users, it helps to save time in the lab.”

“I really like the flexibility of the OT-2. There are some companies that design machines only for MALDI, but we can do a lot of different protocols on the OT-2.”

“The OT-2 has quickly become an invaluable, integral member of our lab team.”

“With the OT-2, we save a ton of time. Period.”

“You can make Opentrons do anything you want!”

“For a robot that does what the OT-One does, I was quoted $200,000-350,000 dollars. When we’re a start-up of three people, I can’t invest in something that expensive. Opentrons gave us the opportunity to be accurate and predictable without the huge price tag.”

“That would have been amazing! I would be able to write so many of my experiments with this, now that I think about it.”

“Since it can run a lot of my Bradfords and other assays that I do on a regular basis, I have so much free time to be reading papers and understanding the science behind a lot of the work that I’m doing, and ways to improve our experiments.”

“For me it’s opened my eyes totally. There’s this whole world that I didn’t even know was possible for me to actually get into and understand, and it’s just made me really excited.”

“Having an Opentrons robot makes that cycle a lot quicker and a lot more useful.”

“For me, because I’ve been doing this for over 10 years – pipetting, I mean – this is gonna save my arm a lot of wear and tear.”

“It’s been amazing. You started sending me protocols and I’ve been able to just do them!”