Working in a university or research laboratory on interesting, complicated problems in the sciences has a romanticized, glorified position in our culture. While the end results are certainly worth celebrating, often the process of new scientific discovery is underwhelming, if not outright tedious. Thatās especially true in biology and chemistry, where scaling up sample sizes isnāt easy without a lot of human labor. A research group from Reading University was able toĀ modify a 3D printer to take some of that labor out of the equation, though.
This 3D printer was used essentially as a base, with the printing head removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi camera. The printer X/Y axes move the camera around to all of the different sample stored in the print bed, which allows the computer attached to the printer to do most of the work that a normal human would have had to do. This allows them to scale up massively and cheaply, presumably with less tedious inputs from a large number of graduate students.
While the group hopes that this method will have wide applicability for any research group handling large samples, their specific area of interest involves researching āsuperbugsā or microbes which have developed antibiotic resistance. TheirĀ recently-published paperĀ states that any field which involves bacterial motility, colony growth, microtitre plates or microfluidic devices could benefit from this 3D printer modification.
Source: ROBOT VS. SUPERBUG
