When Alice Pyne starts talking about giving "crystallised virus structures" to school children, my heart skips a beat. Surely we've screwed up the next generation enough already without giving them the means to wage biological warfare.
The virus in question, the tobacco mosaic virus, "cannot infect animals," she reassures me later.
Her point is that instead of relying on 2D images in textbooks, we should be giving school children something real. Moreover, she wants them to be able to see these tiny structures in 3D with their own eyes.
Pyne, a PhD student at University College London, is trying to give schools cheap access to the expensive imaging capabilities that allowed her team to capture the first in-water image of the DNA helix structure.
And to do that, she and her colleagues are developing a £300 open-source atomic force microscope (AFM) that uses 3D-printed parts, Arduino computers and Lego bricks. "We want to enable children to see biological samples that they wouldn't otherwise get to see," she tells Wired.co.uk.
AFMs aren't microscopes in the traditional sense of the word.
You don't put your eye to a piece of glass and stare down at a sample. They are far, far cooler than that.
They're like miniature record players, with a tiny needle attached to an arm and a laser reflecting off the arm. When you move a sample under the needle, the arm bends as the needle moves up and down in response to bumps on the sample's surface. This causes minute changes in the reflected laser light.
By recording those changes, you can build a 3D image of nanoscale structures. It's essentially a 3D scanner for tiny unseeable things. "What makes [research-grade] AFMs so expensive is that they do a lot of different things and have many different modes," Pyne tells Wired.co.uk. "We're imaging very small areas and doing the simplest type of atomic force microscopy."
The microscopes were developed on a recent trip to Beijing, where Pyne and 11 other UCL students teamed up with students from Tsinghua University and Peking University, along with students from Oxford University and Singapore University of Technology and Design. In five days, Pyne's team successfully built and tested a working AFM.
Most of the parts they used were either sourced from electronics markets in Beijing's Zhongguancun technology hub, 3D-printed, or constructed from Lego or Make Blocks. Two specialist components were ordered online prior to the trip. "You're not going be able to find a split quadrant photo detector or piezo actuators on the side of the road," explains Pyne.
The microscope they constructed is built upon a metal base, with housings built from Lego and the various component holders 3D-printed to ensure a perfect fit between the Lego to the component. The scanning stage is inspired by research from Bristol University and is also 3D-printed.
Piezo actuators, components that move when an electric field is applied (or vice versa), were the most expensive part, taking up about half of the entire microscope's cost. When 10V is applied, the Arduino-controlled actuators move the scanning stage by just a single micron, allowing for incredible scanning resolution.
The project isn't purely altruistic, however. Pyne is hoping that by spreading these low-cost open source microscopes to schools across a country like China, crucial information about the effects of pollution, for example, can be crowdsourced. The schools get low-cost access to high-tech scientific tools and researchers potentially get access to data uploaded by ranks of newly-inspired teenage scientists.
It's not currently known when the project will be fully online and up and running, but Pyne says they'll be developing it over the next year.
Updated 19/09/13: Involvement of students from Oxford University and Singapore University of Technology and Design added
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
