This month I was fortunate to be invited to Yamaguchi in Japan, to take part in YCAM’s Interlab Camp: Personal Biotechnology.

YCAM, or Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media / 山口情報芸術センター, is an amazing media arts center with exhibition spaces, a theatre, workshop spaces, and even a biotechnology lab. Over the course of three days, 30 participants, together with speakers, mentors and the YCAM team, explored the topic of personal biotechnology, conceptually, and in practical hands-on workshops, which also featured the use of 3 Bento Lab devices to prepare DNA samples for Nanopore MinIon sequencing.

YCAM Bio Research

The first time I visited Yamaguchi, which is at the south-west tip of Japan’s main island, was in 2015. I came to YCAM to mentor a synthetic biology workshop as part of the bio-media art group BCL. This workshop was also the first time we tested our earliest working Bento Lab prototypes.

At the time, the team at YCAM was just getting interested in exploring bioscience as part of their media arts practice. Since then, the Bio Research team at YCAM has set up a dedicated wetlab and organised workshops such as Biotechnology from your Kitchen and a series of field trips called DNA of Forests which led to the creation of a botanical guide based on DNA analysis.

Arriving at Interlab Camp: Personal Biotechnology

Interlab Camp was structured around four concepts:

1. Reading DNA (first day)
2. Writing DNA (second day)
3. Bioethics (second day)
4. Group work to create conceptual proposals (third day)
   
   

The participants included visual artists, high school students, designers, a musician, an anthropologist, and a few reporters. They were complemented by mentors and speakers, including Hideo Iwasaki from Waseda University, Sebastian Cocobia, contemporary dance art group Contact Gonzo, and also myself.

First day: Hands-on DNA analysis

The day started with extracting DNA from different vegetables, which included the use of Bento Lab’s centrifuge. YCAM had set up three Bento Labs shared between the participants.

The lab work was led by YCAM’s Kazutoshi Tsuda, who demonstrated each step. YCAM’s team also had a helper at each table, to make sure no participant was struggling. After the DNA samples were cleaned up, they were set up for PCR amplification using Bento Lab.

While waiting for the Bento Lab units to perform the PCR run, it was my turn to give a talk about the origin, development and ethos on Bento Lab. The talk was going to be live-translated into Japanese, a first for me, which I had been feeling nervous about. Usually I speak quite spontaneously, but this time I had to talk for about two to three sentences, then pause to let the translator take over. However once I got used to it, I quite enjoyed this way of speaking, as it broke the talk into many small chunks, and each time the translator spoke I had a quick pause to consider how to best make the next point.

After my talk and Q&A, the participants resumed the lab work. Using a nanodrop, they measured the amount of DNA that had been amplified. Fortunately, all PCR runs had worked very well, and everyone obtained good results.

For the last activity of the day, each table was given a Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencer. Working in pairs, the participants set up the flow-cells to sequence the DNA they had extracted from vegetables that morning. The first day ended up being a marathon, and we finished after 9pm! The other mentors and I were amazed by the commitment and skill of the participants, many of whom had never handled a micropipette before.

Analyse, Discuss, Conceptualise

The second day and third days built on the “reading DNA” activity of the first day. First, Toshiaki Katayama of Biohackathon showed participants how to analyse the sequencing results of the previous night’s MinION run.

The day continued with talks by Hideo Iwasaki and Sebastian Concobia. Professor Iwasaki is both a scientist (studying cyanobacteria at Waseda University and heading the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Network), and an artist working with biological media. He spoke about his journey as a hybrid artist-and-scientist and his personal home laboratory. I particularly like his piece aPrayer, which takes the Japanese custom of holding memorial services for laboratory animals, and expands the notion to synthetic cells.

Sebastian Concobia, who featured alongside Bento Lab in a Do-It-Yourself Biology feature story of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun, also gave an inspiring talk about his quest to engineer a true blue rose in his home-based laboratory. The story of a young girl who used his lab to study the nutritional needs of Oxalis Stricta, a plant Sebastian was also studying, stuck with me in particular. She was testing optimal growth conditions of the plant for her school’s science fair, work which resulted in a growth medium for plant tissue culturing of the plant.

On the last day, participants formed groups and worked on conceptual proposals that creatively reflected on the activities and topics of the workshop. After only a few hours of work, each team presented a short talk detailing their proposal. The results included a hilarious presentation on comparing laboratory rituals to the classical Japanese tea ceremony, to probiotic toys designed to strengthen children’s immune systems, to the idea of genetically engineering dogs to be able to drink alcohol – so they can be even better companions.

Genome Bento

A definite highlight of each day was the lunch – a specially commissioned lunch box called Genome Bento.

Bento means “packed lunch” or “lunch box” in Japanese. Each day’s Genome Bento was specifically prepared using only ingredients whose genome had been completely sequenced. On the last day, the lunch was provided as a Genome Bento buffet instead, with ingredients grouped by the year they were sequenced. It was one of the simplest and most effective ways of engaging with the notion of genetic information I have come across so far, and definitely the most delicious.

The first signed Bento Lab

After the project presentations on the final day, YCAM’s Takayuki Ito asked all participants, mentors and staff to leave a mark on one of their Bento Lab units. What a simple and brilliant idea! Doesn’t the final Interlab-Bento-Lab almost look like a rock star guitar? Honestly, I was quite moved by the result. I hope it starts a trend!

All of the workshop’s materials and protocols are on Github.

MakeMagazine Japan has also posted a great write-up in Japanese about Interlab Camp here.

Finally, I would like to thank Takayuki Ito, Kazutoshi Tusda, Fumie Takahara, Kiyoshi Suganuma and Young-Ja Park for inviting and hosting me. I thought the workshop was an amazing achievement and I was honored to play a small part in it.

(picture above: First concept sketches for “Darwin Toolbox”, drawn by Oran Maguire)

The earliest sketches for what would eventually become Bento Lab were drawn in the summer of 2013. Bethan Wolfenden and I had just spent a year visiting DIYbio communities in Europe and the USA. We were excited by the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration and the potential for synthetic biology in citizen science.

Motivation for Bento Lab came from many different directions

Together with a group of UCL students and the DIYbio group at the London Hackspace, we had run a pilot project to explore the potential and limits of synthetic biology research outside of the university. We were frustrated by the lack of equipment, and easily accessible research materials, but we also experienced that we could build ad-hoc equipment when we needed it, such as a light-bulb duct-tape shaker-incubator.

When meeting other practitioners in the DIYbio scene, we saw many different takes on self-built lab equipment, including the brief-case lab that Hackteria had designed, which was an obvious early inspiration.

iGEM Entrepreneurial Competition

While we were students, both Bethan and I were active participants in iGEM – the international genetically engineered machine competition, a do-it-together research competition for synthetic biology students. iGEM had recently launched a special track for entrepreneurial project ideas, and this seemed to us to be the perfect vehicle to develop an initial pitch for the idea.

We chose an entrepreneurship focused competition, because it was our conviction that we needed to develop Bento Lab as a functioning, sustainable company, if we wanted it to have real-world impact.

We were lucky to receive some recognition from awards, such as UCL’s Focus on the Positive, and from the Royal Academy of Engineering. This pushed us to continue to refine the concept, and use use opportunities like conferences and Maker Faires to collect ideas and feedback.

In 2015, when I spent a year in Tokyo, we pitched Bento Lab at the Slush ASIA start-up competition and to our surprise, we were placed as a finalist.

Beta Testing and Kickstarter

Up until this point, Bento Lab still remained conceptual. We had developed a number of prototypes, and we had collected lots of feedback and application ideas. Our next step was to test whether Bento Lab was not just an engaging concept, but could also be a practically useful product.

We announced a beta testing program on our website, and rented out purpose-built beta testing models to testers working in specific applications, from field research, education and outreach, and citizen science. Our beta testers pushed us forwards, and surprised us with their creativity. One of our first testers was Gianpaolo Rando, who used Bento Lab as part of his Beer DeCoded project, analysing the microbiome of craft beers. Stephane Boyer, of UNITEC in New Zealand, was the first to show off Bento Lab together with a Oxford Nanopore MinIon. The feedback from our beta testers then formed the basis for our Kickstarter campaign.

The Blog and The Future

From the start, our mission has been to bring biosciences to more people. Initially, we were focused in particular on hardware for synthetic biology, and soon we pivoted our focus to accessible molecular biology in general.

We also realised early that hardware was necessary, but not sufficient. Even more important would be easy-to-use reagents to facilitate learning and particular applications, as well as easy-to-understand knowledge resources.

To move closer towards the goal of our mission, we are convinced that we need to tell stories showcasing positive examples of widely accessible biosciences. We have experienced that Bento Lab has been an effective artefact for generating conversations and ideas for biosciences beyond the traditional lab, because its unique design radically reimagines what form a laboratory can take, and who it could be used by.

As part of our mission, we believe that we need to become more effective in sharing the stories of the people using Bento Lab in their research, their educational practice, and beyond, as well as other inspiring stories of Do-It-Yourself and Do-It-Together biosciences.

This blog is part of that effort. Please consider sharing it and help us engage more people with a positive and accessible future of biology.

Thank you!