The Future Food Makerspace is an innovation and training platform, specialising in
plant phenomics. Whether it be through the design and fabrication of custom equipment,
or through training and consultation in experimental design and analytical protocols,
the team at the Makerspace can help solve your phenotyping problems.
The MakerSpace is located in a dedicated, and well-equipped workshop.
Equipment wise, we’ve got an electronics station, workshop grade power tools, and a
couple of state of the art 3D printers that we can use both for both prototyping and end use parts.
We have a traditional FDM extrusion printer that can print reasonably large objects in
a variety of materials like nylon, abs or pla, depending on the eventual use case. We also have a
stereolithography printer that uses liquid resins to print smaller, but much more detailed objects.
So some of these resins have properties that make them good under high mechanical stresses,
whereas others are flexible and behave more like rubbers, and it’s this versatility in
the materials you can use with our printers which makes so useful for designing custom equipment.
The team in the makerspace has quite a diverse set of skills,
and while we are all primarily plant science researchers, we also have members that are
experts in electronic engineering, in coding, in computer aided design, and in fabrication.
This means we can incorporate some quite complex technology into some our designs.
To date we’ve built phenotyping tools that range from quite small to very big indeed.
The smallest thing we’ve built to date would be a flow cell for confocal microscopy. So, this was
custom designed to flow different chemical treatments over a single Arabidopsis root,
and then we could observe it in real time under the microscope. Originally,
this was developed for a project looking at plastid dynamics inside the cells of a root,
but we could also theoretically use it to treat roots with different nutrients or
hormone signals to see how the root would respond as well, and image it in real time.
Moving up a scale, we’ve built various imaging robots. These can move
cameras such as infrared or thermal over the plants, collecting data on how the
plants are responding to various stresses or treatments over time.
It’s this high temporal resolution that gives us quite a lot of insight into how the plants are
responding to these stresses and gives us a lot of useful data. We recently published all these
designs and code and CAD files for these robots in an open-source journal for community use.
We’re also part of a recently funded BBSRC innovation scholars grant lead
by Dr Andrew French, and linked with the University of Lincoln.
This grant is to set up a training course for bioscientists, teaching intelligent and automated
data capture and analysis. The MakerSpace’s part of this is to make “lab by post” kits which can be
sent out to the attendees to build their own data capture devices as part of the training programme
The largest thing we’ve built to date would be our rhizotron imaging system. These are large 1 metre
tall by 70 centimetre wide soil filled chambers, that are designed to allow you to image the growth
and development of crop root systems. Each chamber allows you to image both the roots and the shoots
of the crop plants over time – allowing you to get insights into dynamically how they grow.
Because roots are quite dynamic in how they grow and develop over time, you need quite a few
of these chambers to fully understand the treatment or phenotype that you are studying.
For now we’ve built 28 of these and because of their extreme weight, about 60 kilos each, we’ve
also had to design and build a custom imaging and sample handing system to go along with it. The
whole system weighs in at about 2 tons, but it’s designed to be modular so it can be broken up and
moved between different glasshouses if needed. It takes about 15 minutes to image all 28 rhizotrons.
We also do a lot of work modifying existing equipment and helping design and streamline
protocols to use equipment. Probably the best example of this is the LAT,
our laser ablation tomograph. So, this is a BBSRC funded piece of kit that uses a
high-powered UV laser to ablate samples and image their cellular structure. The MakerSpace has been
heavily involved in getting it off the ground, and we’ve also designed the imaging system and
sample handing system for it, which has really helped increase image quality and throughput.
What do you like about working in the MakerSpace?
That it is different, and challenging sometimes, and that the projects we work on aren’t always
necessarily from my research area. So there’s always, not just new building techniques to learn
from, but sometimes its new areas of science that I’ve not worked in before as well, that we have
to develop kit for. It’s the kind of variation versatility in that, that makes it interesting.
As with all of the Future Food Beacon platforms, the makerspace engages with collaborators both in
the UK and across the world. For further details on how to work with us, visit our website.
The future food beacon - exploring new ways of feeding the world.