How to Build a Lab at Home from a Broke Highschool Student
“I’m so disappointed in you.” This is a common phrase I get every other day from my brother and my parents. I’m totally kidding, they’re lovely people, I promise! But for once, I think I would’ve gotten it from myself if I couldn’t figure out how to build a lab at home. Let me rewind a bit. I’ve had my eyes set on the local science fair for a while. Those two days marked by sweaty palms over giving presentations, meeting awesome people who poured months of work into their poster, grabbing a sandwich from the Tim Hortons nearby for dinner, or listening to professionals talk about their research, are so surreal and unlike anything else. Watching my brother walk up on the stage and win an award last year, made me have my heart set on doing the same.
So I did what anyone with a goal would do, and I put everything into it to achieve it (excuse the sappiness). After months of research and watching youtube lecture videos on regenerative medicine, I wrote a research proposal. And after mustering up the confidence, I sent the proposal to a few researchers at local universities to see if it had wings. Only one professor wrote back; he said it was interesting but because of lab restrictions, couldn’t allow me into his lab to pursue my research. For a few days, I was crushed. I genuinely loved my project, so it felt devastating to know I couldn’t do it even if I tried. In terms of equipment, I needed a centrifuge, incubator and a fluorescent microscope. I calculated the costs of building a lab at home, and it came to be thousands of dollars.
So what is a desperate, poorly-funded bio student to do? Well, there is frugal science, a philosophy coined by Manu Prakash, which champions developing affordable scientific tools in low-resources communities. Inspired by all of Prakash’s inventions, I tried to build this equipment with a MacGyver-esque mindset and figured out a method that works. None of this replaces anything in a real-life lab, but if you’re looking for a quick alternative without access to a lab, you’ve come to the right place.
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A centrifuge is the workhorse of any biology lab. It uses centripetal and gravitational forces to neatly separate different biological materials, like cells, proteins, DNA, of a fluid according to their densities. I used a drill and a circular cardboard cut out, and duct taped down the tubes on two sides to ensure the weight was balanced throughout. There are probably a ton of better ways to do this, but I was on a strict timeline, had 4 days to finish this project, and not enough time to collect all the resources needed. The method still worked like a charm! After 10 minutes of spinning the tubes at full speed ~ 1200 RPM, there was a whitish pellet at the bottom of the tubes, which were the isolated cells!
My first attempt to build this centrifuge was to use the Paperfuge, engineered by Manu Prakash, who’s a superhero when it comes to bioengineering essential laboratory equipment. “There are a billion people on this planet who live with no electricity, no infrastructure, no roads, and they have the same kind of health care needs that you and I have,” Prakash says. His team developed this invention with the drive to help these people.
A paperfuge spins biological samples at up to 120,000 revolutions per minute and costs 20 cents. It’s made of paper, string, and plastic, and is inspired by the design of a whirligig toy. It has enough power to separate the plasma from a blood sample (the golden-standard for a diagnostic procedure) in less than two minutes, which is critical in diagnosing malaria and HIV. However, this centrifuge was innovated to spin samples in tiny capillary tubes, not in larger laboratory tubes. We would have needed to create a huge disc for this idea to work, which we tried, but it ended up not being very safe, as the disc was too large to spin, so we settled with the electric drill.
An incubator is at the heart of any biology lab and a crucial piece of equipment for growing many cell types. It’s simply a warm, humid box that regulates temperature and CO2 content in the atmosphere. Incubators for bacterial culture are easier to make because they’re only warm, humid boxes, without the need for CO2 content; and they’re great for gene editing and manipulating bacteria. However, growing mammalian cells like human cells is a different process. Cell culture requires a specific temperature of 37 and 5% CO2 content, which is essential to maintaining the pH of cell culture media like DMEM (Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium).
The incubator was built mostly out of materials any respectable DIY person would have on their shelf. All the materials I used, are listed here. However, if you wanted a more detailed description of how to build a truly functional DIY CO2 Incubator, the Pelling Lab created an amazing tutorial.
First, you need some kind of box. I found a Styrofoam box in my garage that was used to ship medication that worked pretty well. You can also use an old fridge/cooler. This isn’t necessary, but it’d be great to line the box with space blanket material that you can find at any camping supply store like radiant thermal insulation. This material reflects heat and can be cleaned. A small concern my family and I had was that the Styrofoam was going to catch on fire, though thankfully nothing happened. This material is a barricade between the heating packs and the Styrofoam, which will help you sleep at night knowing your house won’t go down in flames. We then installed heating packs at the bottom, a 12V computer fan to circulate the heat, and a mesh stand in the middle to hold the samples on top of. A DC power supply was hooked up to the heating pads, the 12V computer fan and a temperature sensor.
Next, we also installed a CO2 generator hooked up with tubes leading to the inside of the generator. It runs on the basic concept that baking soda and vinegar react to form carbon dioxide. I couldn’t get a hold of a CO2 tank in time, so we decided to get at least some CO2 in the container, even if not the required 5%.
It’s also important to keep a reservoir of water in the incubator to maintain a humid environment to ensure the cell cultures don’t evaporate. The incubator looked like this by the end.
A fluorescent microscope is a vital piece of equipment used to image particular biological samples (eg. neurons, cells, blood vessels, mitochondria, etc.) and other physical structures. These objects can be visualized because specialized fluorescent compounds only attach to those specific structures. The basic idea of fluorescent microscopy is to imagine a huge forest with animals, trees, bushes and grass. By shining a flashlight into the forest, you can see all of these structures, but it’s difficult to identify what each of them are in the grand scheme of things. If you wanted to visualize just the raspberry bushes, then you would train fireflies to only love raspberry bushes, and only glow in the presence of raspberry bushes. This way, the raspberry bushes are labelled with fireflies, so only they are visualized in the forest.
Following this analogy, the forest is the biological sample, the raspberry bushes are the specific cell or physical structure to visualize, and the fireflies are a fluorescent compound. If you only shine a flashlight without the fireflies, this analogy represents a bright-field microscope.
Fluorescent compounds, also known as fluorophores, are tiny tags (the size of nanometers) engineered to attach to a myriad of biological structures and phenomena in a sample — from molecules to organisms, live or fixated. By absorbing light over a thin range of wavelengths, they are able to emit another wavelength of light. For example, a fluorophore may absorb UV light, where the fluorophore is excited by purple light, and then emit blue light. Depending on their chemical structure, all fluorophores have different peak wavelengths of excitation and emission.
A fluorescent microscope is very much alike to a normal bright-field microscope, with two key differences. First, a light is needed to brighten the sample (UV light), which must be of the wavelength that excites the fluorophore. Second, the microscope must collect only the light emitted from the sample (blue), and not the light used to illuminate it (purple). Even though the UV light goes everywhere, the blue light travels only from the specific structure that you want to visualize. In order to block the UV light, a microscope has a longpass filter that allows the blue light to go through without the UV light. Every longpass filter has a cutoff wavelength, so that if a light has a longer wavelength than the cutoff, it will pass through the filter.
Example parts to build a fluorescent microscope are a Portable LCD Microscope, which has a longpass filter already, and a UV light flashlight. Of course, according to the specific experiment, the light you use to excite the specific fluorophore you want to visualize will vary. I used Hoechst, which is excited by a light with a wavelength around 350nm, which is UV light, and emits a blue, cyan light. This is a general source fluorescent light you can use to illuminate your sample, with red, green and blue fluorescence, if applicable.
The Proof is In the Pudding, a quick TL;DR of everything
The centrifuge is the workhorse of any biology lab. It was functional, and able to pellet the cells.
The incubator is at the heart of any biology lab and is simply a humid, heated box. It is displayed to support cell proliferation on the control sample and on the samples! And there were no obvious signs of infection/contamination! Otherwise, the DMEM would have changed colours from phenol red to yellow/orange due to a pH change associated with contamination.
A fluorescent microscope is used to visualize biological phenomena. It was surprisingly able to image the samples with amazing visuals and great focus for ~ $90, which would have otherwise cost thousands for a professional laboratory microscope.
All of the materials combined came to be around $200, which my dad will never get back. It’s truly “quick and dirty” and far from perfect, but it functions well and gets the job done. Sometimes science seems totally inaccessible, but with a little persistence and some digging through the internet, you can build your dream lab from scratch.
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