DIY chemostat

[Alan Pendley]

Looking for information on building pilot scale chemostat for aerobic yeast biomass production.

Sent from my iPhone

[AdvancedMudPieMaker]

Poli, thanks for those links. I followed the threads and they were excellent. The whole community would benefit from breaking this problem down into some of its parts.

1. A more detailed how-to on building an OD600 meter out of IR LED, a photodetector, and an Arduino board.

2. A how- to on even a species-specific capacitive spectroscopy meter hosted on an Arduino for live cell monitoring.

3. A dissolved Oxygen sensor with Circuit. (commercially available for under $200)

4. A means for temperature controlling 200 liter chemostat--heating and cooling

5. A method for sterilizing large volumes of growth media.

Thanks to all who posted inside of Poli's links. I have lab space and most bio equipment but fall short on the above. Stil scanning ebay and other used equipment sources.

Best to all,

Alan

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Speaking of a OD600 meters... I saw this little gadget demonstrated at a conference not too long ago:

http://buglab.com/docs/BugLab_ODScannerSpecSheet.pdf

Essentially, it's a handheld scanner that you can just push up against the side of a shake flask to measure the OD. You only need 3cm of liquid too. Looks like they're using light reflected from an array of IR laser diodes, and a response that is very linear with cell density.

[AdvancedMudPieMaker]

Patrick,

Thank you for that link. Looked for pricing online and could not find it so I will call on Monday.

I have concluded that yeast propagation equipment would better match my needs because of genetic drift in the chemostat.

Here the DIY challenge is sterility and oxygenation as the scale increases. Commercial equipment is excellent. Can 200 L and the stair steps leading up to that be done in a DIY manner at lower cost?

Thanks to all who posted.

Alan