Building a DIY Cyanobacterial Incubator for less than a 100 dollars

Materials:

• Broken refrigerator or likewise
• Fluorescent Tubes (we used 3)
• Led lights (lots of them)
• Fan (we used a 12V fan from a broken-down computer power-supply)
• A 220V -> 12V power adapter
• Power cables, insulating tape, electrical plugs and a switches for wiring
• An electrical timer

Container

First of all, you need a closed space to build your incubator. We have adapted two different spaces for growing cyanobacteria. Look around in your lab for some kind of closed spaces to adapt. We were lucky to find a very old shaker that had not been used for ages and a small broken refrigerator (about 40 Liters) that was lying around the lab. That's your starting point for your DIY Cyanobacterial incubator.

Illumination

Cyanobacteria need light to do photosynthesis. You need to equip your incubator with artificial lighting to reach sufficient μE/m²/sec for your cyanobacteria to grow happily (the ammount of μE/m²/sec depends on your particular system and you'll have to search for your adecuate conditions. It may be important to sustain cyclic illumination to mime day/night cycles as to maintain circadian rhythmns so here is where the electrical timer comes into play. You can regulate it to any kind of day/night cycle you need for your bugs (16/8, 12/12, etc...). You can also leave them in continuous lighting which may speed up growth, but you'll lose circadian behaviour of genes after some days...
We set our top fridge shelf at 40 μE/m2/sec, our bottom shelf at 20 μE/m2/sec and the rotating shaker at 40 μE/m2/sec on average (we have slight variations according to the position in the incubator, +/- 5 μE/m2/sec). To have a accurate measurement of the ammount of μE/m2/sec we used a hand-held Luminometer

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So now we present our Cyanobacterial Incubator Deluxe.... ta-da!:

Special Features

And....