Transforming Microbial Genotyping: A Robotic Pipeline for Genotyping Bacterial Strains
Author(s)
O'Farrell, B
Haase, JK
Velayudhan, V
Murphy, RA
Achtman, M
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Microbial genotyping increasingly deals with large numbers of samples, and data are commonly evaluated by unstructured approaches, such as spread-sheets. The efficiency, reliability and throughput of genotyping would benefit from the automation of manual manipulations within the context of sophisticated data storage. We developed a medium- throughput genotyping pipeline for MultiLocus Sequence Typing (MLST) of bacterial pathogens. This pipeline was implemented through a combination of four automated liquid handling systems, a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) consisting of a variety of dedicated commercial operating systems and programs, including a Sample Management System, plus numerous Python scripts. All tubes and microwell racks were bar-coded and their locations and status were recorded in the LIMS. We also created a hierarchical set of items that could be used to represent bacterial species, their products and experiments. The LIMS allowed reliable, semi-automated, traceable bacterial genotyping from initial single colony isolation and sub-cultivation through DNA extraction and normalization to PCRs, sequencing and MLST sequence trace evaluation. We also describe robotic sequencing to facilitate cherrypicking of sequence dropouts. This pipeline is user-friendly, with a throughput of 96 strains within 10 working days at a total cost of < €25 per strain. Since developing this pipeline, >200,000 items were processed by two to three people. Our sophisticated automated pipeline can be implemented by a small microbiology group without extensive external support, and provides a general framework for semi-automated bacterial genotyping of large numbers of samples at low cost.
Date Issued
2012-10-29
Date Acceptance
2012-09-20
Citation
PLOS One, 2012, 7 (10)
ISSN
1932-6203
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Journal / Book Title
PLOS One
Volume
7
Issue
10
Copyright Statement
© 2012 O’Farrell et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Subjects
Bacteria
Bacterial Typing Techniques
DNA, Bacterial
Genotype
Genotyping Techniques
Multilocus Sequence Typing
Polymerase Chain Reaction
Reproducibility of Results
Sequence Analysis, DNA
Software
General Science & Technology
MD Multidisciplinary
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e48022