The Video:

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The Podcast:

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The Summary:

With nearly 24 years at Titian between them, Toby Winchester and Arthur Yarwood, both Product Managers at Titian Software, kick off episode 1 of the new video/podcast series, Voices of Sample Management.

While Toby has spent a long time working in the sample management space, even before Titian, Arthur comes from the video games industry, previously working at Sony, making PlayStation Two and Three games. Since then, he's focused on driving innovation in sample management through Titian Mosaic sample management software and developing integrations between Mosaic and lab software and equipment.

"I've been heavily involved with a lot of valued integrations with many liquid handling machines, and writing plugins and integration with numerous kind of scheduling software that accompanies these machines." Arthur Yarwood

In this first episode, Toby and Arthur discuss some of the developments between Mosaic 8 and 9 as well as breaking down abbreviations used by Titian and others in the Mosaic community, including: VSLH (Variable Span liquid handling), TFM (Tempo Fulfilment Module), CFM (Cellario Fulfilment Module) and JFM (Job Fulfilment Module). 

If you have any topics or ideas for our future episodes, or you're interested in taking part, please contact us at info@titian.co.uk

Available as a video or podcast, and you can also view the transcript below:

The Transcript:

Toby Winchester

So, Titian has over 750 years of sample management experience. 

My example being 17 years at Pfizer, with 10 years in sample management looking after rapid closed loop work.

And since then 12 years at Titian looking after rapid sample management loops. With this experience, we thought it might be time to share some of that experience with you, from our insights, and even in the future may bring in non-Titian folk to share their experiences. 

So for the first meeting, I thought I would start with Arthur Yarwood, a fellow Product Manager at Titian. 

Arthur, what have your roles been pre and post joining Titian? 

Introduce yourself

Arthur Yarwood

So yeah, before I joined Titian, I spent 11 years in the computer games industry working for Sony, creating many PlayStation Two and Three games.

I've been at Titian since then, about, nearly 12 years, I've been heavily involved with a lot of valued integrations with many liquid handling machines, and writing plugins and integration with numerous kind of scheduling software that accompanies these machines.

Since then, I recently moved to a technical product manager, here at Titian.  

Where I’ve been looking more into understanding what customer requirements are, and working more closely with vendors and basically, newly activated customer needs to try and design our most optimal Mosaic solutions for what they need.

Toby Winchester

So that most optimal is what success looks like? Or, what does success look like when we've designed something properly?

Arthur Yarwood

Exactly, it's a case of trying to develop features that can solve a lot of the kind of hardships, and for as many customers as possible.

They can have bottlenecks in their workflows that are slowing down any areas where there's a lot of manual inputs and a lot of effort can go into set up runs and fulfil work, and basically leverage what the machines and the software can do to its full capabilities and make the operator's life as easy as possible.

Toby Winchester

Not so much individual developments, but try and make a product that's helpful for more of our customers. 

We've since Mosaic 8 been working on mixtures, pooling, combinations, that's one of the major additions to Mosaic. And, yeah, that's happened through the life period of Mosaic 8, we are now on Mosaic 9.

But you know, over that changing period, could you summarise what's happened with mixtures from potentially the database side all the way up.

Arthur Yarwood

So I think the first step was, as you mentioned, enhancing the Mosaic database and the inventory database that we have to model and store these mixtures to track multiple components in a single sample holder, and concentrations and such like.

Beyond that it was being able to track the creation of mixtures, maybe in an ad-hoc fashion from various liquid handlers, and record what happened on the machine and many dispenses into a single well, basically, and the accountability and traceability there.

More recently, Mosaic 8.6 went on to introduce Mosaic ordering, which has the ability for requestors to stipulate an order, what samples they would like to mix together for whatever science or business process they have and can stipulate which pools of items to go together and then a lot of the enhancements were then taking that, validating it and making sure workflows are feasible, achievable, within the limits of the machine etc. and then track that as a workflow and facilitate operators basically fulfilling that on various machines. 

And as time has gone on beyond there we've been essentially extending each of our fulfilment modules to support mixtures.

Initially it was offline processing and then TFM, tempo integrations, following that, we had HighRes integrations, supporting mixtures and then more recently, Mosaic 9, we now have VSLH supporting mixture creation on your Tecans, your Hamilton Stars, Biomeks, etc.

Toby Winchester

Right. So, as per usual you've used an abbreviation. So, VSLH stands for?

Arthur Yarwood

Variable Span Liquid handler, which is a slightly out of date name as it no longer is limited to just varispan heads. It does also support fixed heads.

So, this could be your MCA head on your Tecan, your core 96 head on your Hamilton Star or your Biomek or block header as well. We support these.

Toby Winchester

These are the sort of machines that have a workbed, and the pipetting heads move over the top of them.

Arthur Yarwood

Exactly, yes. 

Toby Winchester

And usually tip based 

Arthur Yarwood

Usually tip based, yes. 

Toby Winchester

So, you were talking about mixtures - is there a is there a limit to the number of items you can mix together? I mean, you're already saying that science moves forward...

Arthur Yarwood

There are no kind of enforced limits within the Mosaic system and the code. 

Obviously, at certain points, that could be performance considerations and scalability considerations there.

That said, we do have customers who are in 5000 samples in a single well, building of DNA libraries and such like, we have other customers, filling up whole 384 plates with 500 samples in each well. So we do know, for a fact that we support very large scale mixture creations.

Toby Winchester 

Okay, so you're saying Variable Span liquid handling came with mixtures, with Mosaic 9, what's the science, what was the need behind that?

Arthur Yarwood

So the customer there was doing a lot of kind of biological workflows. 

There was a DNA library, like I just mentioned, in tubes, they are doing antibody engineering, mixing heavy and light chains together and growing that, a lot of protein expression and such like, so that kind of small scale workflows on these varispan heads, that's the sort of use cases that we're seeing a lot of.

Toby Winchester

A lot larger scale than the normal acoustic dispensing?

Arthur Yarwood

Exactly. In those sort of scenarios, we've seen a lot of mass, kind of affinity screen selection, mixing various samples together. And we've got special kind of ordering code there that can space out your samples based on the molecular weight automatically. 

So you can then identify them more easily in the screen steps later on. 

Toby Winchester

Okay, so, lots of other things came with Mosaic 9 for Variable Span liquid handling, it brought about dynamic tip selection, why is that important?

Arthur Yarwood

So that's a really great feature, actually. 

So this allows you to use different tip types within a single run on your Variable Span liquid handler. So if you've got a workflow where you've got varying volumes, varying labware types, and you wants to use a different tip type, different parts of this run better accuracy, efficiency, etc. You can now do that.

So, take for example, a workflow where you have many samples and need to normalised and you might need varying volumes of sample transfers and diluent transfers to bring them all to a normalised concentration.

It makes more sense to use a higher tip capacity for the larger volumes. A lower tip capacity for the smaller volume transfers, just to improve the accuracy on the smaller volumes and obviously the efficiency and speed on the larger volume transfers.

So now VSLH, it will evaluate the workflow, look at the transfers that are involved and suggest the appropriate tip types that you might want to use within that run from different groups and transfers, then automatically schedule that swapping with appropriate tips as needed during the run.

Great way to fulfil such a varying workflow in one run without having to come stop and break it up yourself. You got that kind of walk away time. 

You don't have to worry about micromanaging the runners and we're back to making operators like more efficient essentially. Yeah.

Toby Winchester

So what other things have been joined to VSLH in Mosaic 9, rack scanners? Did I see that?

Arthur Yarwood

There was, yes, so there's new features to support 3D rack scanners from the likes of Ziath, Thermo, Azenta.

And here what you can do is perform a scan, a rack scanning run, before your liquid transfer run, where we would evaluate the tubes in a rack.

If there's a source rack, we can just confirm that are the right tubes in the expected locations.

If they're not, we could update the inventory to correct things before you kick off the run.

And then if it's a destination rack, we can use those rack barcodes to pre register those tubes in the inventory for kind of accountability there as well. So great new feature that!

Toby Winchester

One other thing we were talking about tips, tip attaching, and liquid classes. 

So liquid classes, we can detect the top of the liquid level to dispense. And that's fairly standard, isn't it?

Arthur Yarwood

Yes. So we have liquid level detection, within our Tecan driver, the Evoware driver, where we could respond to any kind of transfer failures that come out of that detection.  If there's an empty unexpectedly, empty source well, for instance. 

Recently, in Mosaic 9, that has been brought forward into the Fluent control driver from Tecan, so you've got the same support there. It's just a great way just to give you that accountability, in case your source samples aren't up to scratch basically. 

Toby Winchester

On there

Arthur Yarwood

On there, yeah 

Toby Winchester

Maybe some went gel like or whatever over the years. I've lived the dream. 

Yeah. You've discussed earlier fulfilment modules. What is the difference between and as per usual, lots of abbreviations CFM, TFM. And JFM. 

Arthur Yarwood

A lot of FMs, yes. Not to be confused with freezer management. 

We have our TFM, our tempo fulfilment module, which is what integrates with the Beckman Tempo scheduler.

We have CFM, which integrates with Cellario scheduler for the HighRes platforms.

Both of these are very much kind of specific to those two vendors. We're very kind of... our integration fully fits with how, whichever application or Cellario application works and prepares data in the appropriate manner for those two applications.  

Then we got the JFM, which is the job fulfilment module. And this is more of a generic offering. 

The idea being here, the customer or vendor can integrate with JFM, then we'll get a standard code job specification coming from this application that would outline all of the work transfers that needs to be performed and an integrator, third party integrator, could utilise that, take those transfers, drive whatever application or machine they have, again, the pool transfers, they're being filled. And we have some work underway at the moment from Biosero, who are going to be using this. 

It’s a space to watch. And it's a great way for other vendors and machines to be integrated without necessarily writing a whole new fulfilment module from scratch.

Toby Winchester

So better for us, but also allows other vendors to integrate with Mosaic.

Arthur Yarwood

Exactly. And similarly, if you've got a customer who's got a homegrown, home built system, could be an option there as well.

Toby Winchester

Opening the door to Mosaic integrations. Okay. 

Thank you, Arthur. That was insightful. 

Arthur Yarwood

Not a problem. 

Toby Winchester

Thank you everyone else for your time and any questions, please send them to info@titian.co.uk