Projects

This section of the website provides details of ongoing project to build low-cost open designs for bioinstrumentation. The long-term goal is to help build an accessible platform for educational and research use of the plant Marchantia polymorpha. Marchantia is arguably the simplest and most facile plant system for bioengineering and educational studies. Recent progress in research laboratories have given rise to new approaches and resources that can potentially place more advanced scientific capabilities into community labs and classrooms. However, the high cost of scientific instrumentation is often a list to uptake of new approaches. Biomaker is an attempt to reduce these costs by exploiting parallel advances in desktop manufacture, commodity electronics and AI-facilitated software development. Here you will find a series of logs for recent or ongoing projects to build and test practical devices that could help hands-on biological experiments.

The projects are often ongoing - with different design features being tested. The open build logs may be works in progress, but hopefully might be useful for other DIY researchers, who may have other (better) ideas, and/or need to adapt to different local materials or biological subjects.

AirFlow isothermal microreactor

Description of the design and build of the "AirFlow" isothermal microreactor — a low-cost, 3D-printed incubator that uses forced hot air (rather than a Peltier block) to hold microtube reactions at a constant temperature for things like LAMP diagnostics. It covers the historical inspiration (early hair-dryer-based PCR machines), links to an eleven-part prototyping series on Hackster, and then a detailed build guide: the heat-resistant 3D-printed housing, PTC heater and blower fan, an MCP9808 temperature sensor, Arduino-based control electronics, and a touchscreen interface built with XOD and 4D Systems Workshop4. It closes with performance results (~2 min to temperature, <1°C stability), cost (~£100), and downloadable design files.

AirFlow PCR device

An in-progress build log for the "AirFlow PCR" device — extending the earlier airflow-based isothermal incubator into a full thermal cycler. It covers the 3D-printed housing (heat-resistant filament, a cross-flow fan, a 50W PTC heater, and a servo-driven vane that switches between closed-loop heating and open-loop cooling), the electronics built around an M5Stack CoreS3/UiFlow2, and a comparison of temperature sensors (K-type thermocouples with a real calibration test, plus TMP119 and PT1000/MAX31865 as more accurate alternatives needing custom UiFlow2 blocks). It ends with servo calibration and touchscreen UI sections, explicitly marked as unfinished.

Hydroponic grow-pods

Marchantia polymorpha is a liverwort used for scientific studies - and this project focuses on adapting hydroponics to this rootless, prostrate plant — developing on a nutrient-film technique where plants sit on capillary matting fed by a thin flowing nutrient film from below. It provides DIY instructions for building a line of 3D-printed "grow-pod" hydroponic units at four scales (Mini, Midi, Super, XXL), each built from adapted off-the-shelf containers with LED lighting, plus a summary of ideal growth conditions (temperature, light, humidity, nutrients). Link to starting point for relevant information.

Gene gun

Some forms of plant transformation are only practically achievable by the use of DNA delivery by particle bombardment. For example, this is the method of choice for establishment of chloroplast transformants. This requires the use of high velocity gas driven acceleration of DNA-coated particles. Commercial instruments for this are expensive, based on helium as a propellant, involving high gas pressures, with high costs for purchase and operational consumable that are not cheap. The project aims to exploit off-the-shelf pneumatic and electronic components, common SodaSteam CO2 gas supplies and particle-inflow techniques to build a cheap working device for Marchantia chloroplast transformation.

Past projects

The Biomaker initiative started with the OpenPlant initiative, funded by UK Research Councils at the University of Cambridge, starting in 2014. We initiated a series of OpenPlant training workshops and informal competitions over the years, eventually rebranding the events and resources under Biomaker in 2017. We have collected the documentation for the (almost 200) projects that arose from these activities. The full list of projects can be found at: https://xod.biomaker.org/projectindex.html, and there is a collection of online project resources, including training materials, at https://www.hackster.io/biomaker/. There is also a Biomaker YouTube channel with older XOD-based training materials and other presentations.