Department of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, United States
Julia Pelesko
Department of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, United States; Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, United States
Department of Pathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, United States; Department of Pathology, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston, United States; Cancer Program, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, United States
Centre for Evolution and Cancer, Institute of Cancer Research, London, United Kingdom
Soumyajit Mandal
Integrated Circuits and Sensor Physics Lab, Case Western Reserve University School of Engineering, Cleveland, United States
Robert A Bonomo
Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Cleveland, United States; Departments of Medicine, Pharmacology, Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Biochemistry, and Proteomics and Bioinformatics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, United States; CWRU-Cleveland VAMC Center for Antimicrobial Resistance and Epidemiology, Cleveland, United States
Department of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, United States; Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, United States; Department of Radiation Oncology, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, United States
A morbidostat is a bioreactor that uses antibiotics to control the growth of bacteria, making it well-suited for studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance. However, morbidostats are often too expensive to be used in educational settings. Here we present a low-cost morbidostat called the EVolutionary biorEactor (EVE) that can be built by students with minimal engineering and programming experience. We describe how we validated EVE in a real classroom setting by evolving replicate Escherichia coli populations under chloramphenicol challenge, thereby enabling students to learn about bacterial growth and antibiotic resistance.
