Abstract

National Infrastructure for Chemical Biology (CZ-OPENSCREEN) is the state-of-art infrastructure for basic and applied research in chemical biology and genetics. The Compound management department (CM) maintains chemical libraries which contain more than 180,000 unique chemical compounds from various commercial and private sources. Advanced laboratory automation is used regularly to process many samples effectively. An automated storage system (ASM, Hamilton) operating at -20 °C is used for compound storage. The sample storage is directly linked to the integrated liquid handling workstation (Vantage, Hamilton), employed for plate cloning, reformatting, and cherry-picking tasks. The current working set of compound plates is stored at 4°C in an automated freezer equipped with random-access shelves (TundraStore, HighRes Biosolutions), which is part of the HTS platform. An acoustic droplet ejection technology (Echo, Beckman Coulter) is used as a standard tool for compound transfer into assay plates. All sample and screening data are managed within the proprietary web-based LIMS and database system (ScreenX). Sample quality control (QC) monitoring is ensured by executing an LC-MS analysis for all newly acquired samples and all screening hits. The CM facility at the CZ-OPENSCREEN is equipped with state-of-the-art automation and, together with a dedicated LIMS and database system, ensures optimal conditions for providing a high-level standard of services.