A low-cost, open-source evolutionary bioreactor and its educational use
- Cleveland Clinic, United States
- Hawken School, United States
- Case Western Reserve University, United States
- Massachusetts General Hospital, United States
- Institute of Cancer Research, United Kingdom
- Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, United States
Abstract
A morbidostat is a bioreactor that uses antibiotics to control the growth of bacteria, making it well-suited for studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance. However, morbidostats are often too expensive to be used in educational settings. Here we present a low-cost morbidostat called the EVolutionary biorEactor (EVE) that can be built by students with minimal engineering and programming experience. We describe how we validated EVE in a real classroom setting by evolving replicate Escherichia coli populations under chloramphenicol challenge, thereby enabling students to learn about bacterial growth and antibiotic resistance.
Data availability
We provide the materials to build an EVE on our Github: https://github.com/vishhvaan/eve-pi. We have also included the data to generate figure 2 on the Github.
Article and author information
Author details
Vishhvaan Gopalakrishnan
Drew FK Williamson
Funding
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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A low-cost, open-source evolutionary bioreactor and its educational use
eLife 11:e83067.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.83067
