Every frugal biofoundry definitely needs frugal hardware. The cost of hardware has been a huge challenge to most biofounries. Being able to have access to open frugal hardware designs will go a long way to increase the quality of research being conducted. As part of the friendzymes initiative, we seek to create biofoundries across several countries where we will design and build several hardware components to facilitate and improve the quality of the enzyme manufacturing.
We have three hardware components that are essential for frugal enzyme manufacturing, purification, and quantification. We explain in detail the construction and outcomes of these frugal hardware we are building to add to our biofoundries.
Frugal bioreactor
Necessary for producing the vessels of our enzymes, B. subtilis, in large amounts for them to secrete our polymerases in large amounts.
Frugal Chromatography column
Necessary for separating desired proteins of interest after our vessels have successfully expressed and secreted them.
Frugal Fluorescent Plate Reader
Necessary for having a readout on the purity of the enzymes obtained through our chromatography column.
In every laboratory activity, you need hardware, gadgets, materials, and support equipment. In this section, we give you an overview of our progress in the area of hardware and tool development. We will go through some important steps to build, test and evaluate the three basic hardware we will be building for our biofoundry. Building these hardware will not on;y facilitate and improve the quality of research but will overall help save massively on the cost of acquiring commercial hardware or constantly purchasing reagents supplies from commercial sources. In developing countries, where access to a constant supply of reagents is a major problem, these hardware components will help eliminate this challenge. The overall total cost in building these hardware is approximately $4,000, which is several thousands of dollars less than commercial hardwares of the same design. In terms of performance, these frugal hardwares are comparable to their commercial counterparts.