Say what you want, but the ingenuity lives

A camera-attached laboratory microscope: $2,500.
An imaging chip, a smartphone, and some Lego blocks: $400.

Scientists at Caltech, out to ruin microscope manufacturers, have built their own device to monitor cells growing in a Petri dish. The device – which they call an ePetri dish – does away with the normal habit of taking the Petri dish out of the incubator and inspecting them under a microscope. Instead it takes images of the entire dish surface over time from inside the incubator. Without ever disturbing the cells they’re trying to grow, researchers can now take these cell growth “movies” and replay them whenever they want.

With the ePetri system, cells are grown on a CMOS image sensor – the kind found in common digital cameras. A smartphone placed above the sensor provides – via a commercially available app – a scanning spot of light that sweeps back and forth across its LED screen. Legos provide an enclosure that the smartphone rests on (noLego NXT needed here). The contraption sits inside the incubator while a wire connects the sensor to laptop outside. Pictures are taken by the sensor and transferred to the laptop. With the ePetri system, scientists no longer have to remove the cells from the incubator but can simply look at the laptop images. Less manipulation makes for better cell health and reduced risk of contaminating them.

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I was never in love with cell phones, and frankly am FRICKIN EMBARRASSED when I see this, not to have kept up with that end of things. Time to dump the Curve for an Android?

Device can be used for medical diagnostics, to image cell growth continuously

PASADENA, Calif.—The cameras in our cell phones have dramatically changed the way we share the special moments in our lives, making photographs instantly available to friends and family. Now, the imaging sensor chips that form the heart of these built-in cameras are helping engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) transform the way cell cultures are imaged by serving as the platform for a “smart” petri dish.

Dubbed ePetri, the device is described in a paper that appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).