High-throughput cultivation and screening platform for unicellular phototrophs

BACKGROUND: High-throughput cultivation and screening methods allow a parallel, miniaturized and cost efficient processing of many samples. These methods however, have not been generally established for phototrophic organisms such as microalgae or cyanobacteria. RESULTS: In this work we describe and test high-throughput methods with the model organism Synechocystis sp. PCC6803. The required technical automation for these processes was achieved with a Tecan Freedom Evo 200 pipetting robot. The cultivation was performed in 2.2 ml deepwell microtiter plates within a cultivation chamber outfitted with programmable shaking conditions, variable illumination, variable temperature, and an adjustable CO(2) atmosphere. Each microtiter-well within the chamber functions as a separate cultivation vessel with reproducible conditions. The automated measurement of various parameters such as growth, full absorption spectrum, chlorophyll concentration, MALDI-TOF-MS, as well as a novel vitality measurement protocol, have already been established and can be monitored during cultivation. Measurement of growth parameters can be used as inputs for the system to allow for periodic automatic dilutions and therefore a semi-continuous cultivation of hundreds of cultures in parallel. The system also allows the automatic generation of mid and long term backups of cultures to repeat experiments or to retrieve strains of interest. CONCLUSIONS: The presented platform allows for high-throughput cultivation and screening of Synechocystis sp. PCC6803. The platform should be usable for many phototrophic microorganisms as is, and be adaptable for even more. A variety of analyses are already established and the platform is easily expandable both in quality, i.e. with further parameters to screen for additional targets and in quantity, i.e. size or number of processed samples. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12866-014-0239-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.