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 them in their biology courses and start exploring the world of biotechnology.

Tubes coming out of the reactors

OD device and pump box

We focused on building a highly modular system. Requirements on lab equipment change from experiment to 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.

References