Page 13 – Bionomous

Small model organisms

Over the past years, zebrafish have proven to be excellent model systems for a wide panel of experiments. We have discussed throughout our previous articles their advantages and disadvantages, how they could be incorporated to various research fields and different automation techniques which facilitate their handling in laboratories. Today we will discuss 4 other model organisms: Drosophila melanogaster, Xenopus laevis, Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana, all have in common their genetic similarity to humans, their ease of care and prolific breeding. While this last feature is particularly useful for studies requiring…

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14 December 2020

Articles

Studying zebrafish behaviour: robotics and automation

In today's article we will take a step back from zebrafish embryos and discuss how adult zebrafish collective behaviours can be studied using robotic systems.Danio rerio, commonly known as zebrafish is a small but robust cyprinid, commonly found in food plains of the south of Asia, particularly India. They thrive in shallow and slow flowing-waters and can generally be found in standing water bodies, often connected to rice cultivation. This is most likely due to the high content of zooplankton in rice cultivations, a major component of the zebrafish diet. Zebrafish…

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30 November 2020

News

Venture Kick – Stage III

We want to thank Venture Kick for their trust and support! It was January this year when we were selected to enter the Venture Kick program and now we are very excited to announce that we have reached the 3rd stage succesfully! Bionomous has been awarded with the 150,000 VK funding to bring automation to the lab. Since we entered the Venture Kick road, we have accomplished several milestones that would not have been possible without their support. Among others, we have been able to finish the development of the beta version…

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20 November 2020

Articles

Morphological and phenotypic characteristics of zebrafish embryos

In our modern world, development of new synthetic compounds and chemicals is essential for many industries, such as the pharmaceutical, clothing and food industries. This has become a major public and environmental issue as many of these compounds can be toxic and detrimental to human and animal health. In addition to these artificial toxins, chemicals can occur naturally in the environment such as heavy metals or nitrates. Although it is widely recognised that such compounds can cause damage to life, how harmful they are and how they cause disease needs…

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16 November 2020

News

SICTIC Investor Days

We are very grateful for having been given the opportunity to pitch at the SICTIC Investor Days.This month we had the magnificent opportunity to pitch our company twice at the SICTIC Investor Day events.SICTIC (Swiss ICT Investor Club) is a non-profit association with a strong investor community which organizes the deal flow and matchmaking of startups and investors online and at pitching events.Since 2018, SICTIC has become the largest and most active business angel network in Switzerland and was awarded “Best Performing EBAN Member 2018” from over 150 member organizations in more than 50 countries.For…

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2 November 2020

Articles

Zebrafish early embryo sorting

Over the past 20 years, the use of zebrafish in the lab has dramatically increased. In 2000, PubMed displayed 657 articles when searching for “zebrafish”. In 2020, that number shot up to 3’979 publications (1). This is most likely due to the many advantages zebrafish represent as an animal model (and which are resumed in our article What are zebrafish). Particularly, their high breeding capacity is a very interesting asset for experiments requiring large sample sizes. Zebrafish can indeed produce up to 300 embryos weekly, hence why they are referred…

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2 November 2020

Articles

Artificial Intelligence for zebrafish egg sorting

Artificial intelligence always triggers a lot of curiosity when mentioned around a dinner table. AI brings in mind to a lot of people the latest fantastic movie released in the cinema with cool robots and futuristic computer systems. In reality and up until today, AI is really the science of giving to a material device the ability to show cognitive behaviour similarly to humans in order to learn and solve complex problems. AI is very present in our everyday lives and its development and achievements made in various fields is…

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19 October 2020

News

The EggSorter design

Enabled by Design supported us to move from a prototype version of the EggSorter to a finished product ready to be in the market. Since 2017, when the EggSorter project began there have been many achievements. We developed the first proof of concept of the EggSorter in that same year. Then, in 2018, we received the first funds of the EPFL to develop a prototype. After two prototype iterations, we managed to developed a fully functional EggSorter that we brought to end users in 2019, to validate the technology. Once…

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13 October 2020

European Zebrafish Meeting 2020

Meet as at the 11th European Zebrafish Meeting!This year edition of the European Zebrafish Meeting will be held on line, but that has not stopped us from participating. We are very excited to see how this edition goes and to face all the challenges of organising an on line congress. The programme has been condensed in two days to encourage everyone to be fully present throughout the day. And, apart from the keynote and plenary talks and short oral presentations, there will be posters and oral sessions, and coffee breaks where you will be…

Articles

High-throughput screening and automation technologies for zebrafish assays

Although zebrafish have been described numerous times as ideal organism models, manual handling of zebrafish embryos can turn out to be complex and time consuming due to their small size and the large quantities of samples usually required in an experimental setup (1). To increase efficiency of such studies, it has been crucial to develop fast and automated screening methods. In this article we will discuss various high-throughput screening methods and automation technologies which have been developed and proven to be very helpful for zebrafish embryo and larval assays. What…

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5 October 2020