Fluid exchange with LEGOs and ImageJ: NanoJ-Fluidics

We’ve been over-covering DIY syringe pumps for awhile now, but this LEGO based solutions is a lot more than just the delightful idea to use LEGOs for syringe pumps. NanoJ-Fluidics consists of three parts, a LEGO based, multiplexable syringe pump system, a liquid exchange system to cell culture dishes, and an electronic and software control suite for the pumps.

You can check out it out in detail on the detailed GitHub Wiki or read more about an example usage in it’s debut paper currently in Nature Communications: Automating multimodal microscopy with NanoJ-Fluidics. The paper is written by Pedro Almada, Pedro Pereira, Siân Culley, Ghislaine Caillol, Fanny Boroni-Rueda, Christina Dix, Romain Laine, Guillaume Charras, Buzz Baum, Christophe Leterrier, and Ricardo Henriques.

There’s a forum for the project attached to the GitHub, and the makers of NanoJ-Fluidics have found 23 labs that have built this system so far, which is wild.  You can read the twitter thread announcing the publication of the project for an excellent overview, or just watch this little video: