Eric Brown is a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences, and a researcher with the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University. Source: McMaster University
3D printing is changing everything, even the way that scientists operate in the lab, giving them the power to quickly and easily print new devices to aid research. The Printed Fluorescence Imaging Box (PFIbox) is a 3D-printed box that is streamlining the way that scientists are studying bacteria.
PFIbox collects large amounts of data that is then analyzed by researchers. PFIbox is made of nine 3D-printed parts that can be printed in one day and assembled in minutes. The cost of producing the PFIbox is $200. The team has left the code for PFIbox open source and available to anyone.
"We fully expect, in fact, we hope — people take the code for this tool and improve upon it," says French. "We want people to have full access to what we think is a very important new development in the battle against superbugs."
Specifically, PFIbox is being used at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research to help develop and create new antibiotics. With PFIbox, researchers are able to quickly analyze 6,000 samples of bacteria at one time. PFIbox uses LED lights to excite the fluorescent proteins in bacteria and then wirelessly sends the data to the researchers.
"3D printing is allowing us to create tools and instrumentation that simply don't exist yet," says infectious disease researcher Eric Brown, who led the work on the project, along with Shawn French and Brittney Coutts. "Here, we have designed and built an absolutely cutting-edge lab instrument for about $200. It's simply game-changing for our work to discover new antibiotics."
The paper on this new 3D-printed box was published in Cell Systems.
