Editing Laboratory robotics (section)

===Pharmaceutical applications===

One major area where automated synthesis has been applied is structure determination in [[pharmaceutical research]]. Processes such as [[NMR]] and [[HPLC]]-[[Mass spectrometry|MS]] can now have sample preparation done by robotic arm.<ref>Gary A. McClusky, Brian Tobias. "Automation of Structure Analysis in Pharmaceutical R&D." Journal of Management of Information Systems  (1996).</ref> Additionally, structural protein analysis can be done automatically using a combination of NMR and [[X-ray crystallography]]. [[Crystallization]] often takes hundreds to thousands of experiments to create a protein crystal suitable for X-ray crystallography.<ref>Heinemann, Udo, Gerd Illing, and Hartmut Oschkinat. "High-Throughput Three-Dimensional Protein Structure Determination." Current Opinion in Biotechnology 12.4 (2001): 348-54.</ref> An automated micropipet machine can allow nearly a million different crystals to be created at once, and analyzed via X-ray crystallography.