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BioElectronic Interface |  Rapid Prototyping in Biology |  DNA origami |  BioEngineered Inks

Prototyping in biology is for the vast majority done by qualified humans in laboratory settings. Only once an experiment has been thoroughly worked out do higher throughput machines and protocols get introduced. Manual human prototyping is not going to be eliminated anytime soon. Yet, despite the vast array of technologies available in biological labs, many mundane tasks (such as turning on a waterbath in time to let the water rise to temperature) are still being coordinated and executed by the scientists themselves. This creates a large amount of overhead and increases the learning curve for more junior scientists. Furthermore, much of the data generated by experiments are handwritten in notebooks and protocols are often altered to adapt to the present situation in the lab. All of these aspects contribute to the difficulty to troubleshoot a failed experiment, making it so hard to identify where the errors lie that scientists often decide to repeat the whole experiment.

The goal of this project has been to create a set of technologies able to assist the scientist in their everyday workflow. I firmly believe that creating succesful technologies in this space can revolutionise the way laboratory experimentation is done. Not only do the proposed technologies aim to reduce errors but they also open the door for interdisciplinary approaches such as advanced heuristic methods to validate scientific experiments. Furthermore, some of these tehcnologies were born from my desire to bridge the worlds of biological entities and electronics. This has instilled the aim to create technologies that enable faster iteration in biological protoyping such as advanced data collection directly from biological entities.

Wireless Sensors/Actuators Network

Using off-the-shelf electronics, I built a series of networked sensors and actuators. Each sensor/actuator is connected to an XBee wireless radio which communicates with a coordinator radio attached to the main computer. This infrastructure is readily extendable to accommodate more sensors/actuators.
The list of sensors constructed to date enable the measurement of:

• pH/Redox Potential
• Temperature
• Humidity
• CO₂ concentration
• Light
• Optical Density at 600nm

Wireless actuators are currently being used to communicate with lab equipment and control their various functions. So far, we have sucessfully controlled a spectrophotometer and heat block. However, because the technique takes advantage of the machines' communication ports, this approach should be applicable to any equipment equipped with a computer communication interface.

Touch Screen

We are currently developing a touch screen computing interface for laboratory settings. I am aiming to use this interface as the central medium to interact with the digital dimention of laboratory experiments.
I will share more details about this technology in the future. A brief teaser video is available on the left or here and here

Label Printer

Using a Brother label printer, I wrote a web-based utility for printing customised labels. The utility lets the user add their own label layouts to the system or select from the list of previously uploaded layouts to print from. Once the layout selected, the user inputs the the data and the label prints remotely. As with all other systems created, this web-based application is designed to work with full browsers as well as mobile platforms.

RFID authentication

I am currently developing a system to enable the usage of the employees' RFID tags as a fast login mechanism for the various interfaces and tools created. It makes use of libnfc to read the tags.
More information will be released once the implementation is complete. A protoype video for this is r available here

Web Interface

While at IBM an interactive web-based interface was developed where all the collected data is displayed. This interface was born as part of the bioelectronic interface project started in the Ellis lab at Imperial College and continued at IBM Research.

The idea of using technology to assist a scientist in the lab is not a new one. People have tried in the past to create technologies aimed at making the work in the lab more efficient. However, for the most part, they were unsuccessful. While looking at these past implementations in the course of the last few years, I realised that the majority of these products/technologies were being created by computer scientists with little or no experience of work in a laboratory. Their implementations are often too complex and have little consideration for the scientist's workflow. As a result, the technologies require acclimatation and cause mistakes to be made which leads to corruption of scientific data. All of these aspects amount to a high cost to the scientist who cares primarilly about the experiment.
Being a biologist myself, yet having software and hardware skills, I have been designing and implementing these technologies to ensure maximum flexibility and robustness of the workflows while minimising learning aspects. The goal has been to provide very simple and intuitive interfaces that easily integrated in the experiemental workflow of a scientist.

  Stephen Heisig

  Gong Su