A common issue perceived in underfunded labs across the globe is access to technology for biological analysis. The means often utilized for these analyses consists of exorbitant prices and requires transportation of samples to off-site locations to due equipment’s location. This lack of readily access has proven to be a hindrance, even to a number of iGEM Teams. In order to effectively address this issue, we designed a prototype to serve as an alternative for a plate reader and analyze bacterial samples for a low cost.

The above photos are of another model shown at the 2017 RESA Conference and the Atlanta Science Festival. Primarily serving a purpose of grabbing public attention, it is programmed via a small computer chip to change the luminosity of the lights from a high state to a low state depending on a change in the circuitry.
This represents precision metabolic engineering in cells with the luminosity being the ‘output’ of the cells. This model’s purpose was to represent how precision metabolic engineering allows cells to rapidly switch between different metabolic states (ie. differences in luminosity).