Interactive biotechnology learning and design using games and remote-control labs
This article from Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
The team also constructed a probiotic biology cloud lab using BPUs capable of carrying out remote-controlled experiments to stimulate biological materials, such as cells, and measure the biological responses. Students and scientists can send instructions to a robotic lab and get back experimental results.
The team constructed this BPU by using LEGO Mindstorms to create a liquid-handling robot. This robot traveled over a flatbed photo scanner. The scanner held petri dishes containing the slime mold Physarum, which eats oatmeal.
The researchers incorporated the BPU as a lab component in a graduate level theory class. Using remote-control interfaces on their smartphones, students ordered the robot to drop oatmeal onto specific petri dishes. The software allowed them to choose different droplet patterns.
The scanner recorded how the Physarum followed each trail of oatmeal dots by “sniffing out” chemotaxis cues in the petri dishes. (Chemotaxis refers to how microorganisms respond to chemical stimuli in their environments.)
The team built three BPUs, each holding six petri dishes. All three units were housed in a server rack typically found in a cloud computer site. “Our prototype BPUs supported 18 users and allowed us to assess the scalability of cloud labs,” said Zahid Hossain, the Stanford doctoral student who worked with Riedel-Kruse on this third project. “I want to see advanced BPUs supporting many different types of experiments and thousands of different users.”
“The obvious next application is online education at scale that includes true biology experiments, also opening new opportunities for learning-research. And cloud labs can change how we work as scientists.” Riedel-Kruse said.
Open source computing has been around for years and has been a wonderful enabler for the app market not least because there are so many independent programmers who have the wherewithal to deliver products based on their pet projects. Creating an open source environment for the biology/ biomechanics/nanotech space should have a similar enabling effect and is a further example of the accelerating pace of technological innovation.
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