The articles in this section explain how to generate manual instructions for scientists to follow in the lab using hand-held pipettes.

Not all experiments in the lab are conducted on liquid handling robots.

Often, scientists still need to do a lot of their experiments with hand-held pipettes. Either you don’t yet have access to your liquid handling robots, or perhaps you just want to test your biology in the lab with a small scale manual experiment. Either way, you still want to design, iterate and plan those experiments in Synthace, leveraging all of the planning capabilities that provide a digital record of your manual experiment.

Manual Execution mode allows you to:

You may not have immediate access to your liquid handling robots. They might not be delivered and installed, set up to work with SynthaceHub, or be in use by someone else. However, you still want to get value from Synthace by designing and planning experiments. This is possible by generating execution instructions to follow manually in the lab with your hand-held pipettes.

You can still use Synthace to do all of the volume calculations and plate mapping (all whilst having a digital record of the experiment you want to carry out), so you are not prevented from designing, planning, performing or recording your experiments.

Before moving on to liquid handling automation, you may want to perform some small-scale biological experiments manually to test if the biology works.

With Manual Execution mode, you can design and plan your experiments in the Builder for small scale biological experiments, generating manual instructions to follow in the lab.

Having confirmed that the biology works, your manual workflows can be re-simulated against your liquid handling robots, when available, with some additional minor workflow configuration (e.g., liquid policies, deck configuration, etc.) ready for scaling up your experiment throughput on automation.

When you build complex workflows in Synthace, the process is iterative. You normally add a few elements, set some parameters, simulate, review the results, then go back to the workflow to continue building on your design.

This process can sometimes be slowed by needing to debug the “what” you are trying to achieve (the biological experiment) from the “how” it is going to be achieved (your device-specific constraints).

Use Manual Execution mode to separate the concerns of the biology (e.g., are the right liquids mixed together into the right plates at the right times?) from the concerns of your liquid handling device configuration (e.g., am I using accessible plate locations or the right liquid classes for different transfers?)

Separating these concerns helps you speed up your workflow design iteration by focussing on the “what” you want to achieve first, then focussing on the device configuration aspects to configure the “how”.

Sometimes you may not intend to carry out your experiment on a liquid handling robot, but instead use your hand-help pipettes in the lab.

You can leverage Synthace to design, plan and execute manual experiments as easily as those that you plan to carry out on liquid handling automation, regardless of the throughput.

This will let you design and record more of your experiments outside of those that are run on liquid handling automation.

This series of tutorials explains how to run experiments in Manual Execution mode