“Sina Barazandeh watched in amazement as a robotic arm glided back and forth across his team’s lab. The arm loaded a multi-well plate into an instrument that filled the wells with liquid, then carried the plate to a distant device that analysed the wells’ contents. Baranzadeh, a computational biologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was stunned by the seamless interplay of the lab equipment — no human intervention needed.

The autonomous cooperation is thanks to a software framework called the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) that connects disparate laboratory instruments. It also enables an artificial-intelligence system called an agent to control the equipment and orchestrate experiments. The system grew from a collaboration between US AI firm Anthropic and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia…

For Virginie Ruetten, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus, MHS allows for more efficient monitoring of her complex experiments. Ruetten uses zebrafish (Danio rerio) to study what the body does when the brain is asleep. Without MHS, she needs to launch seven programs that control more than 20 instruments to measure cellular activity across the fish’s body. With MHS, she can start an experiment with a single click, which she says has allowed her to do research 'in the way that I always wanted to, but often was difficult because you only have so much time'.”

From Nature.