While designing our chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), we noticed that CARs are inherently modular in structure: every CAR requires an extracellular domain to recognize a target, a transmembrane domain to transduce the signal into the cell, and an intracellular domain to induce some response by the cell. This realization inspired us to design CAR-TK, a chimeric antigen receptor toolkit that facilitates modular assembly of CARs. Learn more on our engineering page!

Many protocols—for our project's purposes, protein purification in particular—require constant but gentle mixing of small quantities of liquids for extended periods of time. Our lab does not have the expensive equipment capable of this, so we designed and built an end-over-end rotating device and packaged our code and hardware for future teams and researchers to construct their own end-over-end spinner.

Below is a video demonstrating how our rotator functions in practice. Warning that the audio may be loud!

With the understanding that many other teams may similarly lack access to industrial rotating devicecs, we have published all of the code, files, and documentation necessary for any future team to construct their own hardware. This includes design files for the 3D printing process, code for the electrical components, and clearly written explanation of how to piece together the various components of building this device. You can access all of this documentation at this repository.

After designing DNA sequences, it is crucial to ensure they contain codons easily recognized by the desired host organism's translation machinery. During our design process, we struggled with finding easy-to-use and accurate codon optimization software, so we developed our own. Learn more on our software page!

Sequence alignment is central to biological experimentation, with extensive applications enabling everything from inference of evolutionary relationships between genes or proteins to comparison of synthetic genetic constructs with their theoretical designs. During our design process, we struggled with finding easily accessible and straightforward online alignment tools, so we developed our own. Learn more on our software page!

Over the course of our project, we practiced multiple protocols many times and developed optimized procedures that we have shared in our experiments page.