Now You Can Build Your Own Open-Source Optogenetics Hardware

Recently, researchers at Rice University released designs for an open-source optogenetics hardware platform.

In a paper available through the open-access journal Scientific Reports, bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt and his lab colleagues detail how to build and calibrate their Light Plate Apparatus (LPA), which they say can be done in a day. Better yet, the component costs will only run you $150 if you have a 3-D printer handy (or $400 if you don’t).

With this device, you can control gene expression through light-responsive signalling pathways in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells by delivering controlled light signals to samples in a 24-well plate.

The Rice lab also took pains to make the tool itself user-friendly for non-programmers, by creating a graphical user interface called Iris. Researchers without any background in programming can rely on Iris to do the heavy lifting of converting high-level specifications into simple hardware operations.

“Our intent is to bring optogenetics to any researcher interested in using it,” said Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, whose lab created the hardware.

While these designs could be real boon for photogeneticists — Gerhardt says that several research groups had already gone ahead to make their own LPAs after an early version of the paper went live on a biology preprint server — there is another group of scientists that can also benefit from these types of open science papers: biohackers.

Garage biology — the practice of performing biological experiments in do-it-yourself set-ups, often in one’s own kitchen, garage or co-op space — is far from a new phenomenon. The professional scientific community has been writing editorials on the subject of biohackers for years, ruminating on the relative worth of their scientific contributions and reflecting on the barriers that separate garage biologists from the professionals. But even today, one of the major barriers to entry for garage biologists is the high cost and accessibility of equipment.

While it’s possible to craft your own centrifuge using parts bought off Amazon, more specialized equipment is harder, if not impossible, to craft on your own and without specific engineering expertise and a lot of funds. With the advent of 3-D printers, the gap has narrowed considerably, thanks to sites that offer free digital designs for open-source scientific hardware. But as a whole the open science movement has been slow to develop, and so these reservoirs of open-source expertise are limited.

Biohackers may not have been the intended target market for Rice University’s LPA, but innovations like this one play a large role in opening up more niche or nascent fields.

Optogenetics has been steadily growing in popularity within the neuroscience community since 2005, when Karl Deisseroth engineered mammalian neurons to express channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR-2), a light-activated protein commonly found in the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Since then, neuroscientists have gone on to develop tools that use light to control activity within different types of cells beyond neurons. So it’s not surprising that there have already been rumblings about optogenetics within biohacking’s online communities. Looking at the future potential uses for optogenetics, it’s easy to see why.