Popping up in the chemistry lab (Image: RunPhoto)

Pack it in, pricey lab gear. Bubble wrap can be a cheap, easy way to run a variety of tests on medical and environmental samples.

Standardised and stackable, 96-well assay plates are the gold standard for running small sample diagnostics and simple liquid reaction tests in chemistry labs. But at $1 to $5 a piece, this can be too much for labs around the world with limited resources.

George Whitesides at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University was on the hunt for low-cost diagnostic tools made from things that are already mass-produced with high quality but low cost.


“We like the idea of using materials that are readily available and seeing how much we can do with them, going far beyond their intended purpose and adapting them to address local problems,” says Whitesides. Previously, his team has found uses for paper as devices for testing water quality, egg beaters and CD players as centrifuges and bicycles as power sources.

Bubble basics

Whitesides says that the idea of bubble wrap for chemical assays popped into his head because it is readily available, cheap, lightweight and the bubbles come in a range of sizes. The interior of the bubbles are sterile, alleviating the need for expensive sterilisation equipment.

The bubbles are permeable to gas, but to inject the reagents needed to react with the things being tested, the bubbles have to be punctured with syringes. The team found that clear nail hardener from a pharmacy can be used to seal them back up.

The transparent compartments would be most useful for simple diagnostic tests that can be analysed visually, such as reactions that change colour, says Whitesides.

For instance, the team successfully ran blood tests for anaemia and diabetes, cultured the common food-borne bacteria Escherichia coli and raised the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is widely used as a model organism in biology experiments.

Journal reference: Analytical Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/ac501206