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Welcome to the BioArtBot wiki! This is an open-source project with a vision for accessible automation tools for synthetic biology. Contributions are welcomed! Read the links below to get an idea of how we all work together, and how you can get involved.
BioArtBot is envisioned as an open-source “cloud lab kit” that works at the interface of microbiology, robotics, and software engineering - three core competencies of synthetic biology. The kit will use an entirely open-source stack, including open-source hardware and OpenMTA strains and plasmids. The goal is to enable broad adoption, and encourage expansion of the kit by users.
Remote learning has become a critical part of education in the age of COVID-19, and will likely continue to be for some time[1]. While lecture-based remote learning opportunities exist for synthetic biology, there is a gap in hands-on learning options that are remotely-accessible. Educational “cloud labs,” in which students remotely direct robots to execute experiments have been proposed, and early demonstrations have seen some success, but were also limited by the complexity of labwork [2, 3]. One strategy shown to manage complexity in a STEM education context is to provide the student with a self-contained kit that guides them through a well-defined experiment[4, 5]. Marrying this “kit” model with a cloud-based paradigm may prove an effective way to bring “hands-on” learning to any student with a computer and an internet connection.
Starting in 2019, a bio-maker group at Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, California has operated bioartbot.org, an open-source project that could provide the backbone of such an educational approach. This website allows anyone to create art designs on a computer that are then robotically “printed” onto agar plates with color-expressing E. coli. The project’s original pilot was successful, with 35 drawings submitted from the global public and printed at Counter Culture Labs. This success suggests that a version of the platform adapted for classroom learning may prove a useful, easily-deployable tool for remote synthetic biology education. Due to it’s open-source nature, it could additionally provide the foundation for a distributed network of synthetic biology education cloud labs.