Automated Plant Tissue Excision and Manipulation via Integrated Robotics and Machine Vision for Plant Transformation

Automation technologies in the biological plant sciences domain lack the ability for handling soft, live, and solid biological materials necessary for lab-based plant genetic transformation testing. This limitation has created a research bottleneck hindering progress in agricultural, biomedical, and pharmaceutical industries. Traditionally, plant transformation at lab-scale testing has relied on slow and labor-intensive manual techniques, contributing to this challenge. Automation offers a promising solution to accelerate plant biosystems research, enabling higher throughput in gene functional validation, and shortening crop improvement timelines by reducing the need for manual interaction and allowing for continuous sampling. To address this, an automated system for addressing early steps in the plant transformation process is reported here. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the development and evolution of tools for acquisition and manipulation of living plant tissue samples, known as explants, based on extensive testing with an automated plant transformation system.