XClose

UCL News

Home
Menu

Mobile DNA testing lab kick-starts biotechnology revolution

6 May 2016

A new mobile DNA testing lab designed by UCL graduates is promising to "revolutionise biotechnology in the same way that Apple did for computers".

Mobile DNA testing lab kick-starts biotechnology revolution

Bento Lab is the size and cost of a laptop and users can extract, copy and visualise DNA.

Co-founders Philipp Boeing and Bethan Wolfenden, who had the idea as UCL undergraduates, have raised over £150,000 in a Kickstarter campaign, far outreaching their goal of £40,000.

They launched the campaign to fund a manufacturing round after two years of prototyping a model built in collaboration with PhD researchers in UCL MakeSpace .

"It's taking some essential pieces of molecular lab equipment and putting them into an accessible format," Bento Lab co-founder Philipp Boeing explains. "We're trying to redesign the user experience around DNA analysis and make it much more affordable, so it can be used by lots of different people."

Bento Lab will enable people to carry out experiments like checking if their food contains genetically modified organisms (GMOs), extracting ancient DNA from a fossil, and testing their variation of the "athlete" gene.

Democratising genetics and molecular biology

By bringing DNA testing to a wider public, Bento Lab will engage people hands on with the ethical questions raised by genetics and molecular biology.

"We already live in a world where we can make three parent children and we have genetically modified foods, and cell lines that have been kept alive for a long long time, and this really stretches what the term life and nature actually means," says Wolfenden.

Questions raised by such developments affect us all and Wolfenden says "one of our aims with the project is engaging people from all kinds of audiences with those complex questions."

But currently the technology is inaccessible and expensive. "We felt that it was so great that there was the BBC micro:bit and the Raspberry Pi computer engaging lots of people in computing, and Arduino is doing a similar thing in electronics. We felt the same thing was missing from molecular biology," says Boeing.

The lab contains a thermocycler, centrifuge and illuminated gel unit, in an elegant white box designed to be "small and cute".

Engaging with makers and citizen scientists

"Of course at first it was very grand and then it became very simple," says Boeing. After winning a UCL Bright Ideas award, he and Wolfenden, who is currently a UCL Biosciences PhD researcher, tested out their idea with a "make pretend" Bento Lab at the Maker Faire Rome. "We just had conversations with people for three days about what they might do with this lab if we had built it."

They say they are inspired by the maker movement and citizen science. "It's problematic when our devices that we buy are becoming more and more complex and closed down and we don't really own them anymore," Boeing says of maker culture, and he points to citizen science projects that are "very political and involved", such as monitoring noise pollution around Heathrow.

Bento Lab will use the extra money from their Kickstarter campaign for additions including a Bento Lab Mobile and Web platform for users to share experiments, and piloting hands-on genetics teaching in classrooms.

"We're providing a starter kit for beginners, which also engages with ethical concerns and responsibilities of being a well-rounded citizen scientist," says Boeing. "We want to enable those who are really interested in genetics to have a relationship with it in a meaningful and responsible way."

Melissa Bradshaw, UCL Communications and Marketing