Radix Labs

Radix Labs is a company founded in October 2017, focused on tooling for biologists. Their core product is called Taproot, a compiler that ingests high-level programs describing fluid handling protocols, turning them directly into robotic execution.

These programs do not contain concrete information about the specific materials to use at runtime. Instead, they contain constraint information regarding protocol steps, such as This segment must be carried out in a 96-well plate or This segment must complete in under 10 minutes. This constraint-based specification is combined with backend-specific information to generate backend specific machine code.

Supported platforms include:

• Opentrons OT-1/2
• Volta
• Humans (via programmatic work instruction generation)

The company was originally founded to provide software for a theoretical class of device, the Field-Programmable Microfluidic array. Device manufacture and operation remain unsolved problems, but Radix is attempting to provide a uniform programming model across fluid manipulation backends.

Existing work included BioCoder an imperative language providing abstraction over microfluidic chips. This work was specialized to PDMS/quake valve based FPMA's.

Core compiler development relies on several algorithms, including subgraph isomorphism , Variants on the Chinese postman problem and Vehicle routing problems .

These subproblems handle extensions of a Von-Neumann like architecture to a biology lab - similar to register allocation problems being solved by a C compiler.