This week we caught up with Joe Liscouski, Executive Director at the Institute for Laboratory Automation (ILA) in MA, USA, to find out more about how the use of liquid handling has evolved over the last decade and to gain some insight into what we can expect next.

This week’s blog focusses on the ethical issues surrounding biobanking, based on a recent interview we conducted with Zubin Master. Dr Master, Assistant Professor at the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College, will be discussing this topic in detail at ELA 2013 as part of his presentation, “Biobanks: Consent, Consensus & Public Trust.”

Dr Stephan Schürer from the University of Miami speaks about the goals of the BioAssay Ontology Project to enable standardized description, integration and meta-analysis of assay and screening results - http://bit.ly/15HpwvN
Dr Schürer will be discussing this topic in more detail at ELA 2013 as part of the Drug Discovery Automation track - http://bit.ly/16jbuPq

Dr Holger Becker, Chief Scientific Officer of microfluidic ChipShop GmbH, discusses the great potential of microfluidics in our latest blog entry – http://bit.ly/15HpwvN.
Dr Becker will also be running a training course on ‘Microfluidics from the Concept to a Product: Technologies, Applications and Commercialisation Strategies’ at ELA on June 5th http://bit.ly/13ovJPE

In the run up to European Lab Automation 2013, we’ll be sharing some interesting news and insights around the event on our new blog - http://tinyurl.com/aafeu9f .
We’d be delighted if you’d like to comment on some of our blog posts, adding your own thoughts and generally become a valued part of the conversation!

In this week's blog entry - http://bit.ly/15HpwvN - Dr Quail gives us some insight into the current advances being made in NGS, as well as some of the challenges still facing the optimisation of NGS pipelines.
Dr Quail will be speaking at ELA 2013 about the new NGS applications being developed at the Sanger Institute, as well as some of improvements his team are making to sequencing protocols.