Yeah there are robots, but they tend to be $500,000+ and many scientists in this field are tech luddites who are allergic to learning how to program a robot.
A postdoc will do the same work for (probably) less than 1/10 of the price AND do free overtime. Better yet, you can sometimes get students to do this work for free/nearly free.
That’s also assuming they are able to get funding to cover any of these costs.
As for using a multipipetter, it just depends on the experiment and you can do ~10 at once.
Also too there is a lot of prep to get those thousands at once. Maybe 10x the work rather than 1000x but if your doing basic research your looking at effects small scale. ramp up happens when results are promising.
Yeah there are robots, but they tend to be $500,000+ and many scientists in this field are tech luddites who are allergic to learning how to program a robot.
A postdoc will do the same work for (probably) less than 1/10 of the price AND do free overtime. Better yet, you can sometimes get students to do this work for free/nearly free.
That’s also assuming they are able to get funding to cover any of these costs.
As for using a multipipetter, it just depends on the experiment and you can do ~10 at once.
Also too there is a lot of prep to get those thousands at once. Maybe 10x the work rather than 1000x but if your doing basic research your looking at effects small scale. ramp up happens when results are promising.