In the last year or so we have become interested in exploring 3D-printing applications at the interface of the chemical and biological sciences. One of the attractive ideas here is the ability to make our own lab equipment, particularly for preliminary studies and for outreach activities. Our first attempt looked at 3D-printing a water heated cuvette for UV/ vis spectroscopy. The work was led by an undergraduate project student and has recently been published in Analytical Biochemistry [1]. The 3D-print designs can be downloaded from the manuscript supporting information. We have also recently used 3D printed equilibrium dialysis devices to investigate the effect of macromolecular crowding on protein binding [2].
3D-printing
[1] Pisaruka, J., & Dymond, M. K. (2016). A low volume 3D-printed temperature-controllable cuvette for UV visible spectroscopy. Analytical Biochemistry, 510, 52-55.
[2] Wei, Y., Mayoral-Delgado, I., Stewart, N.A. and Dymond, M.K., 2019. Macromolecular crowding and membrane binding proteins: The case of phospholipase A1. Chemistry and physics of lipids, 218, pp.91-102.