The Biomaker initiative was established by Prof. Jim Haseloff at the University of Cambridge in 2017 as an interdisciplinary programme aimed at fostering collaboration and innovation at the intersection of biology, engineering, and digital technology. It emerged from the OpenPlant initiative. Some of the local coordinators and global partners are listed here. Biomaker provided a platform for students, researchers, and professionals from diverse backgrounds to collaborate on creative projects that leverage open technologies for biological research and education. The initiative offered participatory learning and experimentation, shared workshops and access to tools and materials. Participants engaged in challenges and competitions to create cost-effective, open-source biological devices and solutions, ultimately advancing scientific knowledge and accessibility in the field.

The Biomaker initiative was inspired by over a decade of running interdisciplinary student teams for the iGEM competition and research challenges at the University of Cambridge. Joint projects were always creative and exciting exercises, where new ideas were bounced around. However, new ideas require testing, and sometimes, custom instrumentation. Software is often the ‘glue’ that holds together new experiments with living systems, commodity electronics and user interfaces. However, while biologists would be most familiar with the target biology, their relative lack of programming experience could limit full co-development of user interfaces and control systems. Biomaker sought to provide access to simple tools and enable the involvement of non-programmers in development of DIY bioinstrumentation. Over the years, we have collated different hardware and software tools, run workshops and hackathon competitions , and produced training materials. Earlier generations of these materials are documented here under the menu selection "XOD archive". XOD is the excellent visual programming interface that we adopted for this early part of Biomaker. Unfortunately its development has stalled due to complications arising from the Russia-Ukraine war.

Jim Haseloff and Matt Wayland have been working on refreshing the tools that underpin Biomaker. As an alternative, we have switched away from Arduino-type hardware to ESP32-type from M5Stack (the chip manufacturer, Expressif, owns a majority stake in M5Stack). Further, a wide range of devices with displays, sensors and actuators is available - with a high level of integrated software support. Development environments range from full professional IDEs to graphical programming tools. For example, most of the work described here can be done using the free M5Stack UiFlow2 package, which provides a dual programming interface for graphical programming with Blockly, with simultaneous access to Micropython code. This provides simple access for beginners, speed for rapid prototyping and an integrated tool for learning Micropython. An important advantage of this more integrated approach is that UiFLow2 provides a built-in editor for the design and implementation of multi-page touchscreen user interfaces.

In parallel, the Haseloff lab was developing Marchantia polymorpha as simple plant platform for bioengineering. This required the testing of rules of thumb for DNA design, production of modular DNA elements, building genetic circuits and testing these in transformed plants. Above all, we found ourselves building new methods and tools for working with the plant - based on its unusual biological features. Unlike other plant model systems, the liverwort spontaneously regenerates, has an extraordinarily streamlined genome and can be propagated by self-produced vegetative propagules or single-cell spores. These features contribute to making it a most powerful system for reprogramming plant growth and bioproduction. The hardware and software engineering approach that is implicit in Biomaker was transferrable to Marchantia, both for building tools for plant experiments, and in the ongoing attempts to genetically reprogram Marchantia.

The marriage of these different approaches is mirrored in the partnering of the two websites, biomaker.org and marchantia.org - with a split focus on "wet" and "dry" tools for engineering in these different contexts. The primary aim of the current work is to bring these together to build accessible (i.e. cheap) resources for plant bioengineering around a simple platform and workflow.

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