The PaR-PaR development team included (from left) Nina Stawski, Changhao Bi, Nathan Hillson, Sean Poust and Gregory Linshiz. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)
Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can't reward it with treats and it doesn't respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called "PaR-PaR." Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered. "The syntax and compiler for PaR-PaR are based on computer science principles and a deep understanding of biological workflows," Hillson says. "After minimal training, a biologist should be able to independently write complicated protocols for a robot within an hour. With the adoption of PaR-PaR as a standard cross-platform language, hand-written or software-generated robotic protocols could easily be shared across laboratories." Hillson, who directs JBEI's Synthetic Biology program and also holds an appointment with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)'s Physical Biosciences Division, is the corresponding author of a paper describing PaR-PaR that appears in the American Chemical Society journal Synthetic Biology.
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