Environmentally Regulated Bioanalysis Chamber
An environmentally regulated, general purpose bioanalysis chamber with imaging is being developed in the lab. It allows scientists to run their experiments in an environment with known temperature, humidity, and oxygen/CO2 levels. The chamber will support CSU’s own biosensor systems which will provide both electronic/chemical imaging as well as the microfluidic support systems, in addition to the chamber’s optical imaging. The chamber will also be able to support general-purpose experiments with widely used well plates, dishes, and flasks. The following diagram shows the prototype design of the bioanalysis chamber (left), and the detailed inside view of the chamber (right).
In addition to environment control, the bioanalysis chamber also provide in-line optical imaging capabilities such as auto focusing and image stitching The following photo shows the stitched human blood smear image done by the optical system inside the bioanalysis chamber.
The bioanalysis chamber is controlled by a user GUI (shown below) to allow individual control of different environment variables inside the chamber as well as live imaging of biological samples under study inside the chamber.
Overall, the design of the bioanalysis chamber consists of multiple aspects of engineering design principles and the over system tradeoff as illustrated below in four major areas.
The capabilities and limitations of the current prototype of the bioanalysis chamber is listed below.
The cost of existing environmental control chambers and their associated microscopes and cameras can be prohibitive. Our bioanalysis chamber design will be a small, inexpensive chamber capable of a fast-settling and maintaining the desired environment throughout the experiment. It has built-in imaging that is adequate for a majority of common use cases. The comparison of the our design against some of the chambers commercially available is given below.
