Team:Sheffield/Description
Introduction
Conceiving our Project
Laboratory equipment is one of the major costs for research laboratories. This includes renting or buying the equipment as well as servicing it. This is a particularly huge strain on young Principal Investigators that have to carry out research with little or no financial support from the university. To tackle this problem more and more researchers decide to manufacture necessary equipment themselves using 3D printers and microcontrollers. The opensource lab equipment design and development movement is called Open Labware. It was proven that it is possible to obtain desired accuracy while cutting the costs 10-fold.
Once developed, the design (circuit diagrams, assembly instructions and CAD projects for 3D-printing) are shared using one of the open source services like thingiverse.com, github.com, or 3dprint.nih.gov. The Open Labware movement is further fueled by constantly decreasing costs for 3-D printing and laser cutting.
It is estimated that an initial investment of approximately 1000 USD is needed to set up the 3D printer, buy electronic components and 3D-printer resin. 3D printing and laser cutting give user unprecedented flexibility in a number of applications, which are only limited by materials that can be used. Most designs are provided together with detailed instructions so that non-specialists could build it, nevertheless, some degree of understanding of engineering, physics, and electronics are needed. Fortunately, a plethora of freeware platforms for e-learning are available (Khan Academy, OpenStax, code.org etc or even youtube.com). Apart from cutting costs, there is a number of advantages that building your own laboratory equipment gives the user. Building the equipment yields much deeper understanding of how it works and what are its limits. It is also easy to customize the design or upgrade the equipment simply by letting the opensource community to work on top of our design. Last, but not least biological sciences become truly interdisciplinary by employing inventors, engineers, and informatician.
On the Origin of Project
Initially, the aim of the project was to create a device for rapid antimicrobial resistance screening. However, the focus of the project got broader later on and evolved into designing a quick, cheap, DIY method for detection of microbial growth. After comparing many methods, we decided to settle on light-based detection. This led us onto microplate design-based light detection device. Microplate reader is a versatile and robust tool used in all kinds of laboratories around the world. They allow us to take biological, chemical or physical measurements at microliter scale. In microbiological laboratory, it can be used to measure the growth rate of microorganisms and in biochemistry laboratory it can be used to measure a rate of chemical reaction.
All microplate reader devices utilise the same principle. They measure the intensity of light passing through the sample that reaches the sensor. The difference between spectrophotometer and microplate reader lies in the scale of experimental setup. Spectrophotometers usually utilise single cuvette with 1 ml liquid volume. Microplate readers, on the other hand, can be used to scale up the experiment to 96, 384 or even 1536 samples at microliter scale. Depending on the type of the assay we can measure how much light is absorbed by the sample, how much light is scattered or how much fluorescence was emitted. Each microplate reader is equipped with monochromator that allows the user to choose a visible or UV spectrum wavelength that will be used for the given assay. Once the user sets the wavelength and begins the assay, the automatic mechanism moves the plate so that measurement can be taken for each individual well.
Most well plate readers are fixed to 96-well format and only allow for discrete measurements at room temperature. Therefore, a user is virtually bound to using the device in the format it was bought till amortisation is finished or the machine breaks down. What is worse, manufacturers of laboratory equipment do not allow for upgrading or updating their devices, which puts an enormous strain on the laboratory workflow, particularly when one considers how quickly novel technologies are developed.
What a perfect microplate reader would look like
It seems that a microplate reader is a very well established technology, and therefore it may be hard to improve on current designs. Nevertheless, as it turned out for our team, we couldn’t find a microplate reader that would suit our needs. We were interested in a system that would:-allow us to easily change between well-number, well-volume and well-height formats without the need to buy a separate device for each format
-support microbial growth (airflow, appropriate temperature and shaking - aeration)
-carry out measurements in continuous fashion
-allow us to have easy and continuous access to the flow of data
-not require from us to take a mortgage on our parents’ houses to buy (low cost)
Surprisingly, we couldn’t find a system with aforementioned features. That is why we decided to employ The Open Labware philosophy and create a device that would suit our needs. Apart from previously mentioned features, we wanted our device to be small and portable to allow for work in confined spaces like incubators. However, size is not the only contribution to portability. Instead of using ‘mains’ powered approach, our device is powered using 2.0 USB cable which allows us to use not only ‘mains’, but also power banks or laptops.
As we worked in The Open Labware fashion, the design and software of our devices is freely available to everyone. Our device is highly customisable and easy to update, which enables users to adapt it for their own purposes. To give examples on what we mean by adaptability, we will present our ideas for how the device could be used in education, fight against the antimicrobial resistance or research.
Sources: 1) http://bit.ly/2je5Gpn 2) http://bit.ly/1FBgcyv 3) http://bit.ly/2je5Gpn 4) http://www.gaudi.ch/GaudiLabs/?page_id=2
