Reimagining the future of high-throughput, cell screening using the Beacon platform

On chip individual cell culture and quantitative assaying

Venue: M10
Contact: Dr. Frans Krens
Speaker: Troy Lionberger PhD, Associate Director Technology Development at Berkeley Lights

Berkeley Lights is a US-based startup that has commercialized the Beacon® Optofluidic Platform, a fully automated microscope that uses light to move single cells and leverages the unique properties microfluidics to perform high-precision, quantitative assays from cultured cell populations.  Beacon is a multifunctional cell biology tool that is rapidly being adapted to a.o. plant cell applications. The underlying Beacon technology will be introduced and its key, enabling capabilities (on-chip cell culture, quantitative assays, high-throughput gene expression profiling, and more) explained.  The application of this powerful set of tools to our first two plant applications will be presented: (1) rapidly discovering disease resistance genes in plants and (2) accelerating conventional plant breeding using microspores.  Proof-of-concept data will be presented that support our vision for genotyping and phenotyping tens of thousands of genetically diverse plant lines at a cellular level within a few weeks.  A new paradigm for plant science workflows will be explained that can rapidly accelerate experiments by restricting high-throughput observations to the cellular level, bypassing the need to grow whole plants until the genotype-of-interest is identified and target microspores are recovered from the Beacon platform.  The goal of our approach is to reduce operational inefficiencies by shortening experimental cycle times and limiting downstream efforts to only those plants that possess desired target genes.

Thursday, April 25, 2019
13:00 - 23:00
WUR – RADIX
Droevendaalsesteeg 1, Wageningen