The phenotype-o-mat: A low-cost DIY plate reader for high-throughput phenotype measurements

Hey, my name is Ben and I’m a scientist at Arcadia Science. I’ve been working on a $400 open-source DIY plate imager called the phenotype-o-mat and I wanted to share the protocol with you all.


It’s made up of a USB camera, custom LED PCB ring, arduino and mostly 3D printed parts and can be upgraded or customized to whatever your needs may be. Here’s some example data from our collection of cross-bred Chlamydomonas strains using the phenotype-o-mat:
I’d love to know if this might be useful for any of you. If you are interested in building one, we are setting up a workshop soon, let us know in the link! bit.ly/phenotype-o-mat We are also working on distributing PCBs to people attending the workshop, can update on that when I know more.

This is our first open-source hardware project we’ve released, if you have any feedback on how we might improve this project we’d love to hear it via replies to this post or in the comments on the protocol itself. If we end up using your publicly given feedback, you can be added as a contributor on future iterations we release.

Thanks!
Ben Braverman
ben.braverman@arcadiascience.com
@bentbraverman on X

2 Likes

Hi Ben,

That is fantastic work in there. Maybe we should talk.

Cheers,
Adrian

Thanks Adrian, I’d be happy to chat! Do you have any use cases in mind for the phenotype-o-mat?