The Pioreactor as a platform for your cultures
Bioreactors for your laboratory can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and often have features that aren't needed but instead become a liability. Instead, some lab teams have resorted to building their own bioreactors, sometimes with long development times and frustrating maintenance. We want something else.
The Pioreactor offers an affordable, flexible, and scalable bioreactor platform for your experiments.
A bioreactor that works with you
Our focus on an intuitive experience has resulted in a bioreactor that is designed for humans - not bioreactor experts. We've abstracted away the statistics (unless you want to get familiar), the software (unless you want to get familiar), and the electrical engineering (unless you want to get familiar), so you can focus on your research.
Real-time optical density, growth rates, and more
The Pioreactor has high resolution optical density sensors, and can measure both high and low optical density. We are the first bioreactor to use this data to estimate the culture's growth rate in real time.
The Pioreactor measures growth rate in real-time, and can change its environment in response to changing growth rates.
All these data are available in realtime in the UI, and programmatically through our software API. Along with realtime optical density estimates, the Pioreactor has built in mixing, heating, and many other features.
Program tasks with Python
At Pioreactor, we think a lot about developer-friendliness, too. The Pioreactor software is open source (and always will be), so you have full transparency into the brains of the system. We have an open Python API, so you can easily create and define your own custom bioreactor behaviour. Going a step further, there is a community around sharing plugins to enable new automations, instruments, and workflows for the Pioreactor. Read more about a simple tutorial or dive into our plugin system.
Our plugin system lets you develop, share, and download plugins to extend your Pioreactor further.
More capabilities with hardware
The Pioreactor offers additional inputs & outputs, so you can try novel bioreactor ideas. For example, you have access to additional GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi, StemmaQT connectors, additional LED outputs for using light programmatically, and additional PWM for driving up to four external devices.
Build out your bioreactor cluster
Other bioreactor systems limit you to a single, or a fixed number, of cultures working in concert. Pioreactor can scale horizontally as many times as you need for your experiments - and all wirelessly controllable from the same interface.
Deconstruct and rebuild
Because of our simple design, you'll feel confident disassembling and reassembling the Pioreactor. All our components are available parts, so if a component needs replacement, you'll have the opportunity to bring a Pioreactor back online yourself - no need to a technician to come in.
Our community welcomes makers, hackers and tinkers who want to break things apart and put them back together in untraditional ways.