This robot could make creating new life forms as easy as writing an app

Efforts are underway to make handling wet materials easier, hoping to put biology on a more equal footing with low-viscosity technology.

Apps and smartphones may attract consumers and investors now, but the future of technology will be even more dazzling. The most radical innovations of the 21st century may well be built not on silicon but on DNA. Over the past few years, it has become much more difficult to make genes from scratch, while the cost has plummeted.

Yet despite biology's version of Moore's Law bending upward, the explosion of startups spurred by better, cheaper digital technology in personal computing still faces significant obstacles. The difference is: basically everything in Steve Jobs' garage was dry. Unlike other types of engineering, the basic materials of biotechnology are both wet and alive. This makes using them much more complicated than whipping out your laptop or soldering iron.

However, efforts are underway to make handling wet materials easier, hoping to put biology on a more equal footing with low-viscosity technology. One of the tools that has biohackers buzzing right now is OpenTrons, an open-source liquid-handling robot that aims to make biotechnology not only drier and faster, but more accessible to anyone with an idea.

The OpenTrons project grew out of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn founded in the DIY spirit of the maker movement. Although genetic engineering techniques have been around for decades, the practice of gene splicing itself remains mostly within the confines of academic research institutions and corporate biotech. But communities of enthusiasts like Genspace have begun to pop up around the world, inspired by the blossoming of creativity and discovery that can result from putting biotech into more people's hands.

“Once this platform is live, people will be able to collaborate on biotech projects the same way they collaborate on code today,” said OpenTrons co-founder Will Canine.

Manual Heavy Work Anyone who has ever worked in or hung out in a biology lab knows that the work can be tedious and repetitive. While the science itself is complex, the labor involved in experiments and engineering consists primarily of sucking liquid from one vial with a handheld instrument called a pipette and then squirting it back into another vial. “Our life sciences professionals spend most of their time doing manual labor,” Kanyon said. "This is a huge bottleneck in research."

As the creators of OpenTrons point out, this process is not only boring but error-prone. Human eyes, hands, and brains cannot ensure the precise consistency that robots are capable of. Laboratory robots are nothing new in the world of biotechnology. But they tend to be extremely expensive machines based on proprietary technology and targeted at a narrow market of professional users.

“People will be able to collaborate on biotech projects the same way they collaborate on code today.”

In contrast, OpenTrons is open source, meaning anyone can copy, build, and modify the technology as they see fit. Its brain is a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that sells for $35, and many of the other components are built using off-the-shelf technology.

Canine said the rapid rise of 3D printing has led to a significant drop in the price of the precision mechanical parts needed to accurately transfer fluids. These components help bring the base model's OpenTrons price down to $2,000—not insignificant, but less than the cost of a new iMac.

The project also aims to make the device's software as accessible as possible, Canine said. OpenTrons uses a drag-and-drop web interface based on Javascript to design and run experiments, rather than a proprietary programming language.

“We’re at the beginning of digitization and automation in biotech,” said Ryan Bethencourt, who helps run SOS Ventures’ Indie Bio, which powers OpenTrons through its HAXLR8TR hardware accelerator. Bethencourt is also a backer of the OpenTrons Kickstarter. “The beauty of OpenTrons is that it is built for researchers who don’t want to program and are used to a modern and simple user interface.”

Life ApplicationsCanine’s early hopes for OpenTrons didn’t sound all that glamorous. He is excited about its potential to create standard, consistent laboratory protocols that produce regular, reproducible data. "The first thing for us is to give people the ability to email agreements," he said.

But he's also hopeful for biotechnology's most ambitious applications. He said OpenTrons is working with Modern Meadow, which is working on "printing" meat and leather without killing animals. He also sees huge potential in synthetic biology, a branch of biotechnology devoted to stitching together new organisms one letter of the genetic alphabet at a time to brew everything from fertilizers to anti-malarial drugs .

Whatever the application, Canine believes the future of biotechnology will be better if more people are freed from the grunt work of biology. “Today, people — Ph.D.s — spend most of their time moving small amounts of liquid around with their hands,” he said. "Our robot does it so they don't have to."