Description - Rationale

We delivered the Hardware Collection, a suite of devices that enable the control and monitoring of gene expression through electrical means. This involves devices that can expose liquid and solid bacterial cultures to AC or DC current in a replicable manner while other enable the measurements of gene expression through reading the electrical resistance of the growth medium.
To control and interface these devices together, we developed the Electro Planner, a TouchDesigner and python Based software that afford easy planning of Electro-Genetic experiments and extended connectivity.

Planning an experiment

The Electro Planner has been designed with ease of use in mind so that researcher can focus on what actually matters: there experiments.
Experiments are planned using any spreadsheet editor (such as Excel or Libre office) to output a CSV file containing the information for each experiment to run. For example, the image on the right shows a Libre Office document describing experiments on a 96 Well plate using the HTEA. On each well is specified the applied voltage (amplitude of the AC Signal), the frequency of this signal, and the length of the pulse sent to the liquid culture.
When supplied with a CSV file specifying only 5 experiments, the Electro Planner adapt its Graphical User Interface (GUI) as it recognised that experiments will be running on the Micro-Electro-Slide.
Templates for both kinds of experiments are available on our GitLab.

Flexibility

Running High Throughput experiments on a 96 Well plate can be time-consuming and timing might be critical in some experiments. For flexibility, we implemented functions in the Electro-Planner that allow the user to define how the experiment will be run. 3 modes are available:

• Run the experiments per wells sequentially (one by one)
• Run the experiments per row and trigger One row at a time (12 Well at a time)
• Point and shoot where the user can simply click on a well to trigger the experiment

Connectivity

The choice of developing the Electro Planner in TouchDesigner has been made for multiple reasons:

1. The pace of development of any kind of graphical application with TouchDesigner is phenomenal. It allows one to pass from idea to Proof-of-concept in a few hours as the programming environment was originally developed to design and develop seamlessly touch-screen interfaces
2. TouchDesigner offers extended, extremely easy to prototype (because of its node-based interface) connectivity capabilities (UDP, UTC, Midi, web application, serial etc…)
3. It is part of the standard toolbox of the Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction and Experimental music community. As we developed our Electro genetic toolkit with applications in mind we believe that developing our control software in a language accessible to communities beyond the life sciences is central for these community to developp applications of the future with Electro-Genetics

Proof of concept: From Twitter to Gene Regulation

To show that our software and the hardware it controls were capable to interfacing with existing digital systems and that the output of our iGEM work meets the ambitions we have laid out in the project description, we have connected the Electro Planner to our Twitter feed.
Here, Tweets with the #Paris_bettencourt are scrapped and analysed. Their content is used to trigger electroshock on the HTEA controlled by the Electro planner.
As shown in our Screening experiments, this electroshock, even short (5 seconds), single pulses, is capable of inducing or repressing the activity of some promoters.
This represents the first proof of concept that our work, enables easy connectivity between Synthetic Biology and the Internet of living thigs.

Figure 6: Schematics of the interaction between our hardware, software, engineered E. coli and the internet