Portable low-cost optical density meter

Measuring optical density (OD) is a very common technique in biological laboratories to determine the concentration of a substance in solution or of bacteria (or microscopic particles) in suspension. For example, bacterial cultures engineered to produce (express) a protein or compound of interest are a workhorse of modern molecular biology laboratories. Commonly, the expression of the product is triggered (induced) by a chemical signal added to the culture at the proper time in the growth curve of the culture (typically in the middle of the exponential growth phase, at an OD value of [~]0.6). The most common tool for measuring OD is a spectrophotometer. However, most spectrophotometers are sophisticated, non-portable and expensive laboratory instruments, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Even a very low cost spectrophotometer for educational use costs at least US$1,000. Because of the cost, even well resourced labs have only one instrument, which becomes a bottleneck when multiple bacterial cultures need to be monitored simultaneously. The problem is more acute in developing countries, where multiple labs have to share a single spectrophotometer, or theres no such instrument at all. Having a cheap and simple device to measure OD would enable multiple people in a laboratory to monitor their bacterial cultures independently, even in resource-limited settings. At the same time, a portable OD meter could be useful for field work. Here we present the detailed build instructions and characterization of a very simple OD meter that costs only US$60, and can measure OD values from [~]0.05 to 2.0. Specifications table O_TBL View this table: org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@721005org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@79c5d3org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@aabb95org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1016f09org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@120f3e2_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_TBL C_TBL