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Team:TU-Delft/Zephyr
From 2013.igem.org
Zephyr: DIY low-cost fluorescence scanner
Zephyr is a low-cost Do It Yourself (DIY) machine which can scan petridishes and 96 well plates for expression of fluorescence at micrometer scale. The Typhoon is the commercial machine that does the same, only it is priced around 120.000 dollars. The main difference is the use of low-cost optics. This allows you to pick exactly which fluorescence you want to detect and not to pay for the ones you do not use. Furthermore, it does not have confocal optics, as this is not that often when scanning bacteria and protein gels. This DIY machine can be built by anyone with one or two days on their hands and the costs are around 1500 dollars.
Why? Reason d’être
Research is not cheap in general and synthetic biology is no exception. Much of the lab equipment has a price running of ten thousand dollars. For some teams this is no hurdle, their lab has all the equipment they possibly may need, while other teams may struggle with their characterization because of lack of needed equipment. This may be an explanation why in the iGEM competition For most of the mentioned equipment, only the high tech versions are available, which make it so costly. However the simple versions of these machines would be enough in most cases. As an analog: there are only high tech Bentleys available and no Ford Fiestas, while these Fiestas would be enough for simple transportation.
Therefore we decided to build a low-cost Typhoon, which would be easy to make on your own. This machine is of course not as high-tech as the Typhoon, but it measures at the same scale and has roughly the same performance.
Drawings
