Hardware in iGEM should make synthetic biology based on standard parts easier, faster, better, or more accessible to our community.
This is a prize for the team that has developed a piece of hardware for synthetic biology. Hardware in iGEM should make synthetic biology based on standard parts easier, faster, better or more accessible to our community. Did your team make a sensor to help teams characterize parts? Did you make a robot that can help teams perform experiments or do cloning more easily? Strong competitors for this prize will demonstrate utility, user testing, and easy reproducibility.
Visit the Special Prizes page for more information.
In addition to encouraging teams to work with DNA parts and build biological devices in the lab, iGEM also encourages other types of technical solutions for synthetic biology. This can include physical devices (hardware) related to robotic assembly, microfluidics, low-cost measurement devices, to name a few examples. There are many exciting opportunities for hardware innovation in synthetic biology.
The section below is a separate, independently-written draft, produced by a team member outside the main documentation process. Kept here for reference and comparison; not yet fact-checked by team leadership.
A flight-relevant bioreactor for an organism processing plastic has unusual constraints: no rotating impellers, no glass, no consumables that need refilling.
The cartridge has to: operate under microgravity; contain a live engineered organism with two redundant kill switches; tolerate launch vibration and re-entry deceleration; accept PET pellets through a single port and emit a single liquid stream of monomer-rich broth; and be sterilisable without a full autoclave cycle, for mass-budget reasons. These five constraints exclude most off-the-shelf bench reactors.
0.5 L internal volume, titanium hull, a single-port pellet hopper feeding PET in, a single-port outflow for monomer-rich broth, and sensors (OD600, pH, temperature, pressure) at the outflow side. A pressure-operated, fail-closed drain valve.
Acoustic standing-wave mixing was chosen specifically because it has no moving parts inside the reactor. CFD modelling (Reynolds < 100, microgravity-style boundary conditions) suggests adequate cell suspension at 40 kHz with two opposed transducers — a result not yet validated experimentally.
Pre-flight: a full autoclave cycle on the empty cartridge, then aseptic loading. In-flight: no re-sterilisation — the kill switches are the only line of defence against contamination once the cartridge is in orbit.
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