“It worked ok as I could sort of see cells, which are about 50 micrometres long, but the images weren't fantastic,” he said. Even with a high-cost microscope you will reduce the image down so that it's just a black dot on the screen moving against a white background so that it's easier for a computer to read.”Īdam realised a USB microscope he'd bought online could be clamped upside down on a table to produce the same images as the much more expensive inverted microscope. The team at Brunel needed the inverted microscope to see whether immune cell behaviour was affected by polluted water. But they needed more than one machine to be able to run multiple tests.Īdam, who estimates the cost of his system to be around £160 but thinks it could be made cheaper still, said: “When you're looking at motility in cells you're only interested in the data – how fast the cell gets from A to B means more than a high-resolution image.
Now Adam has a cut-price version for a study to understand if a snail’s immune system responds to chemical pollutants present in the water, which might influence the levels of transmission of Schistosome parasites from snails to humans. The tool is used to measure cell motility – how fast cells move from one place to another – but the high-quality equipment, used to automatically test multiple samples, can stretch to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Expensive tests for measuring everything from sperm motility to cancer diagnosis have just been made hundreds of thousands of pounds cheaper by a PhD student from Brunel University London who hacked his own microscope.Īdam Lynch, from the university’s College of Health and Life Sciences, created his own inverted microscope by adapting a cheap instrument he bought online to save himself time and money.
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