About This Project

Plant incubators are essential but expensive equipment for the plant scientist: an incubator with active temperature and lighting control is over $2000. Our open-source design is under $200. Incubators are needed to maintain a controlled growth environment. We want to improve our design to reduce the barrier of entry for plant science. The hardware and software will be open-sourced and publicly available. Eventually, a component kit can be released to further increase accessibility.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

For 12,000 years, mankind has relied on plant agriculture to not only survive but thrive. Plant science further shaped biology itself: from Mendel’s hereditary peas to Hooke’s discovery of cells in cork, plants remain among the most accessible organisms for citizen scientists to explore science and the natural world.

At Open Plant, hosted by Genspace in Brooklyn, we are genetically modifying Marchantia (liverwort) to produce insulin. This involves cloning insulin and reporter genes in bacteria, transforming the plant, and propagating its cultures to select the transformed plant. Controlling liverwort growth conditions is vital for reproducible results and plant survival. Collecting environmental data like temperature and humidity helps optimize those conditions. This need drove us to build our own incubators, which we iterated over several years. Now we want to expand the functionality of the incubators in our lab for more generic use.

What is the significance of this project?

This project sits at the intersection of biology and engineering. Often, biology labs lack access to engineering resources, making it hard to create custom, low-cost solutions for technical challenges. Many researchers who could benefit from a cost-effective incubator don’t have access to one. Our open-source, self-assembled design makes the plant incubator more accessible. By providing a pre-engineered solution, researchers can focus on biology while retaining the ability to tweak and modify the designs as needed. Extending this solution to amateur scientists can reduce the cost of running plant experiments and tissue culture by an order of magnitude. This could greatly expand the community of people who grow plants into one that performs plant science, boosting science literacy through the charisma of plants.

What are the goals of the project?

Our goal is to create an open-source incubator with detailed documentation, enabling anyone to build their own. However, designing a custom PCB (Printed Circuit Board) for power delivery and operation requires expertise and resources not readily available to most. Our PCB design will ensure centralized Wi-Fi control, allowing multiple incubators to be managed by a single Raspberry Pi module. This simplifies deployment and makes it scalable for labs with limited technical resources. While labs can still iterate on their own designs, our approach streamlines the process, providing a ready-made solution with robust functionality and support.

We seek funding to finalize the PCB design, unlocking key features like central control, remote access, and integrated imaging for plant growth tracking. These additions, along with hardware fault diagnostics, make the incubator accessible, reliable, and adaptable—lowering the barrier for labs and citizen scientists to advance plant science