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Bioprotocols / labware-databank

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Flexibility as a property? #8

Open photocyte opened 1 year ago

photocyte commented 1 year ago

Microplates are generally pretty inflexible, but when you get into "PCR" plates (and PCR plates are a subset of microplates - I think the "full-skirted" ones may even be SLAS/ANSI standards compliant. Un-skirted clearly aren't given the footprint/skirt is part of the SLAS/ANSI standards), they may be are flexible enough that they can flex in robotics gripper systems (even "simple" robotics systems like small locking tab in a plate carrier for a plate reader). This can lead to dropping a plate or instrument damage.

A flexible property, with two states: "Inflexible", "Notably flexible" might be a place to annotate that the plate should only be used with robotics systems with caution.

markdoerr commented 9 months ago

Thanks, @photocyte, for this idea :) in the current implementation, we have the property "MaxGrippingPressure" (mind: not force ! ;). Do you think, we can use this Parameter to model, what you had in mind ?

photocyte commented 9 months ago

I suppose, if MaxGrippingPressure = 0 -> indicates a piece of labware should not be used with automation… not the most intuitive annotation

photocyte commented 9 months ago

A bit more context from bi-weekly discussion: I was coming from the direction of trying to prevent flexible plates from being used in incompatible instruments & causing them damage. Knowledge to not do this, is "implicit knowledge" for people who have a decent amount of automation experience. But having the knowledge be explicit, could prevent naive users & LLMS/AI generated protocols from making this mistake.

This is a related concept: https://github.com/Bioprotocols/labware-databank/issues/5