A REAL-TIME MONITORING AND INCUBATION INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR CELL CULTURING

Recently, great advances in cell culture have taken place for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. However, continuous monitoring of cell growth dynamics, and providing stable adequate environmental conditions for growing cells in a culture are still significant challenges for in-vitro cell studies. Thus, an integrated low-cost incubation and monitoring system is proposed with the objectives of maintaining optimal cell-culturing conditions, and remotely real-time monitoring the dynamic growth processes of living cells. It controls the parameter values according to the examined cell type through a user-friendly interface, ensures a sterile environment, and provides a method to change the cell-culture media while the incubator door is closed. The main significance of this system is its suitability for biological studies in low-resource laboratories as it is built from commercial off-the-shelf components. The developed system was tested and validated by biological experts at the Animal Health Research Institute in Egypt for incubating and monitoring real biological specimens. The results are comparable to those of the traditional incubator in terms of cell growth rate with less human intervention and contamination rate. In conclusion, the proposed system could maintain the optimal cell-culturing conditions, remotely monitor the cell growth, and provide a sterile environment in low cost and ease of operation.