Bethan Wolfenden has loved DNA since she was a teen and was frustrated with the lack of resources available for non-scientists to study DNA. Along with her team from Bento Lab she created a portable DNA lab for everyone and is currently running a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a production run of parts.
The lab equipment contains a centrifuge, a PCR thermocycler, and a gel electrophoresis to extract, copy and visualize DNA. Taking these expensive technologies and combining them into a portable kit should allow anyone with an interest in DNA to conduct their own experiments. Educators, field researchers, and citizen scientists can all benefit from the system, and several other possibilities are discussed in the campaign video.
There’s a commitment to the project being open source, and source code for the firmware along with design files for the device will be public domain by the end of 2016. A section on safety tells users that Bento Lab complies with laboratory hardware safety regulations, and warns of high voltage, high temperature and a 20,000 G centrifuge. Wearing gloves, protective eyewear, and following the safety instructions will make sure that users are safe. Contamination is also discussed in the Comments section, with the team expressing that the entire top of the lab is a single piece of aluminum, and can be wiped clean with bleach to remove Amplicon contamination.
Bento has been in development since 2013, first on display at MIT’s iGEM competition. 2014 saw a win in the London Entrepreneur’s Challenge and prototype development, with beta testing beginning in August 2015. Full Bento Lab units are expected to ship in November 2016.
A huge draw for this campaign to me is the fact that Bento has so many possible uses on display in the campaign video, and the open source plans ready to be released. The team seems genuinely interested in pushing the world of molecular biology to as many users as possible, and this feels like a great start.