David Kong along with visiting lecturers Julie Legault , Will Canine and Urs Gaudenz spoke about their efforts towards the development of hardware platforms. Synthetic biology requires great hardware. Every synthetic biology experiment utilizes a variety of hardware, from liquid handling systems to centrifuges to culture machines and microscopes.

Design and build a piece of open hardware for biology

For my hardware project, I wanted to combine openSyringePump with the pH-reactive programmable biomaterials termed Organic Primitives I've been developing in my thesis work to create a bionic fruit I call Fructus.

Organic Primitives: material transducers for biological and chemical information

My vision for Organic Primitives is to develop material-based transducers and sensor-actuators for biological and chemical information using food-grade organic molecules that can be accessible to a wide range of audiences. In the process of developing these I've been extremely stubborn and adamant on keeping everything edible and biocompatible, to ensure that these sensor-actuators can be synthesized in a kitchen - without requiring BL1 or BL2 facilities. Ultimately, I'd like for these to be open source and used by people or even have others contribute to the development of new transducers.

  • Can these materials be used to make smarter petri dishes and test tubes?
  • Can they be used to attract airborne microbes in different environments?
  • Can they aid in new discoveries?
  • Can we utilize them to print scaffolds for growing microbes?

    Fructus: a bionic fruit which electromechanically regenerates skins of biomaterial capable of attracting microbes in the environment

    Three applications:
  • What if these can be used in the field to collect samples to attract and trap microbes of desire?
  • Can interactive bionic fruits be used to teach chemistry, biology and food science to kids?
  • Can they be used by chefs to communicate to their guests by remotely triggering Fructus to synthesize different flavors and fermentations based on the course in the meal?

    Syringe Pump Mechanism & design process