Can an Automated Dish Preparation System Deliver Consistent Dish Characteristics, Maintain Acceptable Media pH, and Avoid Embryotoxic Effects?
Acosta Gomez et al., 2025
Preparing culture dishes for embryos is a repetitive yet critical task in IVF laboratories. Manual preparation is time-consuming and prone to operator variability, contributing significantly to laboratory workload.
This research evaluates a novel automated dish preparation system (C:DISH) that uses robotic arms, automated pipetting, and laser labelling to standardize the entire process. The system operates within a controlled environment with filtered air, ensuring consistent preparation while eliminating human-to-human variability and reducing contamination risks.
The authors found no differences between automatically and manually prepared dishes in terms of pH stability, weight consistency, or embryo development outcomes. Mouse embryos developed normally in either automatically or manually prepared dishes. Laser marking for dish identification showed no toxic effects.
The automation of dish preparation represents a significant step toward fully automated IVF laboratories, potentially improving quality control, increasing efficiency, and freeing embryologists to focus on more complex tasks requiring human expertise.