As our cloning tools get more and more advanced, the next bottleneck starts to show up: strain characterization.
For metabolic engineering the chemostat cultivation is one of the most important characterization experiments. But not only are 200-1000 ml chemostats expensive to run, they are also not parallelizable well.
To increase the effectiveness of metabolic engineering research, we made a DIY chemostat bioreactor in the 10 ml scale.
In addition to that we want to do our bit in spreading biotechnology.
At the moment professional lab equipment is not affordable for smaller institutions like schools, community labs and even small universities. If synthetic biology should be announced to a wider public, it is necessary that education can start way earlier. Therefore our reactor system is cheap and DIY, that even school classes can assemble and use it in their biology courses and start exploring the world of biotechnology.
The supervise the experiments we developed the so-called MasterControlProgram or MCP. One single program to control the pumps and the stirring speed and plot all the analysis data. The MCP can work with all kinds of components if they just use the same protocol and so we can easily include more equipment to our experiment.
We focused on building a highly modular system. Requirements on lab equipment might change depending on the experiment Therefore it is useless to create a closed system that can do only one task at all. It should not matter if you need six pumps or just three analysis units or three whole reactors. With our system that is all possible and even more: The open implementation of the MCP makes it possible to easily add new components and stay ready for future requirements.
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