What is (lab) directed evolution?

Oct 04, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

Directed evolution is the technique of controlling an organism's evolutionary trajectory such that its descendants have more of a desired properties. Most often, the engineers will have a strict control of the organism's environment. By controlling the environment and responding to the organism's simultaneous adaption, an organism can be directed to have novel or desirable properties. In particular, the directed evolution of microorganisms is more easily achieved due to their short generation time, high cell density, and isolated environments.

One last blogpost from your favourite employee #3

Sep 26, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

With the end of September approaching, we're on track to soon assemble and send off our first batch of Pioreactors — and it also marks the end of my internship! In this blog post, I'll discuss my experiences over the summer and announce some fun projects we've completed in the last few weeks. 

More on Plugins

Aug 29, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

One of the greatest strengths of the Pioreactor its modularity; both on the hardware and software sides. Previously, you've seen how we can add physical pieces like pumps and LEDs to customize your Pioreactor. To use these pieces (or even change how we use basic actions), we can create and install plugins! 

Using custom automations to control your Pioreactor

Jul 18, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

Inspired by this paper by Knutson et al. (2018), we created a new temperature automation that cycles temperature as a sine wave between 30°C and 40°C over 24 hours. With this new automation, and in our expanded Pioreactor/turbidostat system, we grew some yeast over the weekend – and the findings are quite interesting! 

Pioreactor dev blog #19 - New hardware pages

Jul 07, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

We've been working with a cluster of prototype Pioreactors with slight build modifications, but we have settled on an optimized design. As such, we've recently updated our documentation site to include a new hardware setup section in our User Guide. Check it out!

Pioreactor dev blog #18 - Vial holder

Jun 17, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

We’ve been 3D printing many tools to help us assemble all these Pioreactors as we prepare to launch our first batch. Things like cutting circles into thermal material, assembling caps with tubes/grommets, and even aligning the spinning PCB all use 3D printed tools we designed! You can say our Pioreactors are almost artisanal.

Pioreactor dev blog #17 - Noisy data

Jun 10, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

Hi! My name is Kelly, and I’m the new hire here at Pioreactor! I’m a recent graduate from the University of Waterloo with a BSc, and I’ll be working on the experiment repository, while also making some blog posts to document the experience.

Pioreactor dev log #16 - Cables

Apr 15, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

As we start to take a more critical eye at our project, we are revisiting parts of the Pioreactor that started as temporary hacks, but now need to be updated. Two really positive changes that we've decided on are our cable assemblies. Let me explain. 

Pioreactor dev log #15

Apr 04, 2022 Posted by: Cameron Davidson-Pilon

We are making steady progress on the Pioreactor. Some small tweaks are left to the electronics, so we expect one, maybe two more PCB development runs. We've been procuring parts for manufacturing from suppliers for an initial run of 250 units for late 2022 (plus extras for spare parts and replacements).