Design And Development Of Software System For Open Automatic Nucleic Acid Sample Processing Workstation

With the development of laboratory automation,a high-throughput automatic nucleic acid processing platform provides a powerful tool for applications of molecular diagnostics,such as disease screening and individualized precision medicine.However,due to the differences between software interfaces of different commercial platforms and incompatibility between different types of hardware,it is difficult to integrate different devices and consumables into current laboratory automation platforms for new experimental needs.Therefore,in this research,we propose an open software architecture based on SiLA(Standardization in Laboratory Automation)for the high-throughput automatic nucleic acid sample processing workstation built in the previous research,aiming at simplifying the integration complexity of the different hardware and improving the workflow execution efficiency of the automatic workstation by defining a united interface for software,hardware and related communication protocols.First of all,modeling the system control object by the SiLA standard;then,establishing a standardized system hardware(devices and consumables)model and further developing a 3D visualization modeling tool for our developed workstation.The software can be used to configure the hardware platform,then set up and monitor the automation workflow in real time.In order to optimize control of automation workflow and improve the execution efficiency,based on the design of open software architecture in this work,an intelligent workflow scheduling method combined with graph theories and Genetic Algorithms(GA)is proposed.Finally,to verify the performance of this workflow scheduling algorithm,we perform two sets of the automated nucleic acid extraction experiments on the workstation,analyze and compare execution efficiency of the system before and after workflow optimization.The experimental results show that the intelligent scheduling algorithm proposed in this research can effectively optimize the automated workflow in multi-device integrated workstation and accelerate the parallel processing efficiency of biological samples.This results further demonstrated that the system software and its open architecture design can not only contribute to the standardized hardware integration,but also help to implement optimized control of the automated workflow and enable us to develop an open integrated nucleic acid processing platform,thus satisfying different needs for nucleic acid samples processing.