Cloud labs: where robots do the research

As a chemistry PhD student, Dmytro Kolodieznyi was used to running experiments. But in early 2018, his research advisers asked him to take part in one run by robots instead. They wanted Kolodieznyi, who was developing intracellular fluorescent probes at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to spend a month attempting to recreate his research at Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL). The biotechnology company in South San Francisco, California, enables scientists to perform wet-laboratory experiments remotely in an automated research environment known as a cloud lab. If the trial went well, it would help pave the way to the wider use of cloud labs at the university.