Our light boxes

One main principle of the AcCellerator includes the illumination of our cells. This means we were in need of highly functional and easy to use light boxes.

Last year’s iGEM Team of Freiburg already examined the minimum requirements for a light box and designed an easy approach for building your own. Based on their ideas we constructed our improved boxes, which more sufficiently suited our own needs.

As we are experimenting with different light systems we build two red-light boxes, one with 660nm and one with 740nm, as well as a blue light box.

To ensure the specific wave length we were in need of, we merchandised diodes (Roithner Lasertechnik Germany, LED740-01AU/ LED660N-03) of the desired features and created an easy to replicate circuit to ensure straightforward operability. These circuit modules enable us to combine as many as required, to create the optimal conditions for high activation or inactivation efficiencies. Also it permits us to regulate the size of the light box more easily, so that it could fit at least three cell plates at a time for simultaneous experimenting.

Our boxes are made of simple fabrics from your local DIY-store, consisting of simple PVC plates and acrylic glass glued together and sealed. To ensure equally emitted light on any cell and reduction of the light intensity we also added the intensity decrease units, recommended by last year’s team of Freiburg (frosted glass, clear foil or white paper).

For our blue light system we were coincidently dependent on a functional light box and tried to improve the uniBOX of the iGEM Team Freiburg 2013 for our needs. We used the identical LED band (Paul Neuhaus) as last year’s team and build that into our own construct.