ExFAB automated normalization of microbial cell cultures

DOI #10.17504: The ExFAB biofoundry seeks to develop automated workflows to discover, phenotype, and prototype biology from extreme and exceptional fungi, archaea, and bacteria. The starting point of many phenotyping workflows is a set of density normalized microbial cell cultures. This protocol describes the automated steps needed to normalize the optical density (OD) of microbial cell cultures across a 96-well SBS format plate using a Tecan Fluent 780 system with associate Tecan Spark and custom scripts. The workflow begins with a plate of microbial cell cultures with a range of cell densities, measures cell density, conducts dilution calculations, and creates a fresh plate with each well at the target cell density. The protocol processes one source plate per run, achieving a cell density within 0.03 OD of the target in each well.