Team:BostonU HW/HP/Gold

HUMAN PRACTICES: GOLD

Neptune: Accessible microfluidics for all
[Pardon, under construction]

In our Silver Medal Human Practices page, we outlined our public outreach and industry visits. These experiences drew our team to focus on accessibility in synthetic biology as a theme moving forward with our human practice contributions. For Silver HP, we contributed a set of informational blog posts on the history of intellectual property, and IP in software and in synthetic biology today. We welcome you to read these at our WordPress site :)

Moving forward with the development of Neptune, we decided that we would extend our silver medal HP theme of accessibility in synthetic biology. Indeed, we were developing a complete, end-to-end microfluidic development workflow. Having seen how inaccessible and prohibitively costly microfluidics are for researchers, and also having studied the virtues of open source tools for synthetic biology, we decided to integrate accessibility into our implementation of Neptune.

In this page, we cover 3 ways in which we expand on and integrate the theme of accessibility to our final product, Neptune.
-First, we made it a project criteria that Neptune must interface with low cost, open and readily available tools and hardware to create microfluidics.
-Second, we partnered with the NONA Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to increasing access, collaboration, and building a community around synthetic biology software tools.
-Finally, we offer our team as a point of contact to other iGEM teams that have created software solutions and would like to have these tools protected and stored on NONA.

Neptune: Low cost, easy to use, accessible

As we developed Neptune, we were faced with design choices that would have a large impact on how our workflow integrates with the synthetic biology community. In light of our Silver HP discoveries, we decided the most important design choice would be to make our workflow accessible to all: we want a workflow so easy to use that researchers in synthetic biology will be excited to make microfluidic chips. We want a workflow that interfaces with fabrication protocols that are low cost, such that even DIY hobbyists could make new chips. We wanted a workflow whose hardware could be fabricated with a 3D printer, and whose software is open source so that the entire synthetic biology community can contribute to new features in Neptune. Further, we wanted to ensure our workflow completely and cleanly integrates with current fabrication methods, so that we are still following current standards.

Open Source Software

While this is already an iGem requirement, we are proud to say our source code for Neptune is licensed as open under a BSD-II license. Further, we are very proud to say that Neptune is public on GitHub, and we encourage developers to fork the repo.

Neptune is free to download from GitHub too, and very soon NONA will provide a distribution method.

Integrated, low cost fabrication protocols

This is truly where the Gold Medal HP contributions become apparent. We had a clear choice here: We could have made Neptune interface with industry grade, powerful and very expensive fabrication methods using photolithography and plasma bonding. If we decided to do this, there would be a blunt eighty-thousand-dollar barrier of entry to researchers and hobbyists looking to use Neptune. That would be unacceptable. We could have had Neptune’s microfluidics be controlled using very high precision, high accuracy pumps that would provide flawless flow rates. But the hardware and infrastructure for these pumps would cost hundreds of dollars per pump, and the cost would not scale. We could not settle for this.

We made it our project goal, to fully integrate accessibility into Neptune. Neptune is microfluidics for industry, for research, for education and for hobbyists. We made Neptune have the lowest possible bar to entry; it is the only microfluidic design, fabrication and control workflow all integrated into one software tool-- and the best part is it can be used by anyone. We made accessibility the centerpiece of Neptune.

Open Hardware Schematics