FlySorter was recently awarded our second Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to take our fly-handling robot — MAPLE — from prototype to commercial product. The projected retail cost of the new robot (in a stock configuration) is around $15k.

For the past few years, we've collaborated with the de Bivort Lab at Harvard. They're strong believers in automation there, and together, we designed a robot to handle a variety of Drosophila tasks. You might have seen some tweets here and there about the #FlyRobot; now you can read our preprint, available on bioRxiv.

FlySorter is proud to announce that our application for a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, titled "A high-throughput imaging and classification system for fruit flies," has been fully funded by the Office of Research Infrastructure Projects (ORIP) at the NIH. This award will greatly accelerate completion of our modular robotic system to classify adult Drosophila by sex, eye color, and other phenotypes.

FlySorter will be exhibiting at this year's annual Drosophila Research Conference in San Diego.