Ginkgo Bioworks adds Araceli imaging system to its autonomous lab

Araceli Biosciences and Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA) announced the integration of Araceli's Endeavor® high-content imaging instrument into Nebula, Ginkgo's autonomous laboratory in Boston.

The Endeavor can image a 1536-well plate in under four minutes and runs continuously within Nebula's Reconfigurable Automation Cart (RAC) system. Araceli's ClaireRT™ software analyzes each well as images are captured, and can alert operators or pause imaging when results fall outside defined criteria.

Nebula is built on modular RAC units that combine robotic arms, automated sample transport, and unified control software. The system operates around the clock and uses approximately one-third of the space a traditional lab bench would require for equivalent work. More than 100 RACs are currently in use at the Boston facility.

"The next generation of AI in drug discovery needs a completely different scale of biological data," said Matt Beaudet, President and CEO of Araceli Biosciences. "The lab itself is changing. It now generates cellular data, interprets what it sees, and responds in real time."

"An autonomous lab gets more valuable every time you add a best-in-class instrument to it," said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. "That's what you get with an autonomous lab: the best tools in biology, connected into one system on the same software, running your experiments 24/7."

According to a joint press release, the integration is intended to provide researchers with larger datasets for training and validating drug discovery AI models.

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