Biotech needs a serious kick in the pants. It has always been remarkable to me just how little automation is used in the field of molecular biology. There is a huge amount of work that involves humans doing repetitive tasks and then waiting for something to happen. This increases cycle times, limits the number of hypotheses you can test, and is rate-limiting for the whole field. You already have the problem that you are working on living things which need time to grow, reproduce, eat, etc...
Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.
More specifically, we are able to automate combinatorial gene assembly straight from a web app interfacing with a TECAN microfluidic liquid handling robot.
Here's a proof of concept with a simulator, but I've tested this in a live enviornment.
Teselagen is cool design software but there's a whole other side of the equation.
I don't see any microfluidics in that video, unless one of those reservoir blocks or plates is actually something else?
You know that's pretty far from really automating combinatorial gene assembly :p You need a lot more than a Tecan to do that kind of cloning; even just the assembly reaction (Gibson?), which is the simplest part is going to be better off in a thermocycler or incubator compared to a warmed deck block. Tecans are pretty unusable at volumes below 2-3 ul, too, so setting up the reaction isn't always straight forward, especially if you need to e.g., PCR fragments out for the assembly.
Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.