Cloud Experimentation for Biology: Systems Architecture and Utility for Online Education and Research

Interacting with biological systems via experiments is important for academia, industry, and education, but access barriers exist due to training, costs, safety, logistics, and spatial separation. Automated high-throughput equipment combined with web streaming could enable interactive biology experiments online, but no such platform currently exists. Here we present a cloud experimentation architecture (paralleling cloud computation), that is optimized for a class of domainspecific equipment (biotic processing units) to share and execute many experiments in parallel by mapping synchronous equipment cycles to asynchronous user actions. We implemented an instance of this architecture that enables chemotactic stimulation experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephelum. A user study in the blended teaching and research setting of a graduate-level biophysics class demonstrated that this platform lowers the access barrier for nonbiologists, enables discovery, and facilitates learning analytics. This architecture is flexible for integration with various biological specimens and equipments to facilitate scalable interactive online education, collaborations, conventional research, and citizen science.