Part of a monthly series of workshops exploring technologies at the interface of biology and engineering, academia and industry. The series provides practical advice on how to make the most of the latest biological technologies, with a particular focus on Open Science and how shared tools and resources can catalyse progress in commercial and non-profit environments.
Building Cheap Microreactors
Quantitative and qualitative Open Source LAMP hardware
Fran Quero, Tsinghua University and Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI), Paris, France
We work with open-source technologies that can detect, in a sensitive and specific way, any gene by ~1$. In this talk, we describe the hardware developed around it. We will start with an open-source 5€ water bath that includes an integrated transilluminator, which allows incubating the reactions to get a qualitative result. The second hardware consists of the "open qLAMP" machine; it incubates the reactions and measures analogically the fluorescence in real-time, generating quantitative results and allowing reaction features optimization. During the talk, we will describe and discuss some of the technical solutions adopted (Metal 3D printing, analogic control, optical filters...) that would serve for the audience to adapt them into their designs.
AirFlow Reactors
Jim Haseloff, University of Cambridge
Description of the design and assembly of cheap microreactors for precise thermal control of molecular reactions. In this approach, car fan heaters were used for rapid heating of air within a custom 3D printed vessel. The heaters are low cost, and contain 12V, 50 or 100W PTC (positive temperature coefficient) elements. The elements have a high heating capacity in small reactor volumes, and manifolds were designed to harness heated airflows, to minimise temperature differences across multi-tube samples, and maximise heating/cooling rates. 3D print filaments were chosen for their thermal resistance, and control electronics and interactive touchscreen were designed and built using Arduino-compatible hardware and the XOD no-code programming environment. This could be easily adapted by users without programming experience. The custom microreactors are capable of driving LAMP reactions, and have potential as the basis for design of airflow PCR machines.
Joining Details:
https://zoom.us/j/94698760785?pwd=R2RNYlZMUVVkYmhyMlVCczNQakdEQT09
Passcode: JqhCLq5ewd
For queries: coordinator@synbio.cam.ac.uk