Question: Hi, I'm Aurora. I adore how you use lego in your day job in an innovative way. I also love lego and aspire to use in my future job. My question is, to what extent to you believe that lego could develop and be used in engineering and science, and what did you use the lego mould you made for? Thank you.

Valerie Bentivegna answered on 6 Nov 2017:

Hi Aurora,

For your first question:
In a first instance, there are a lot of kits (like Mindstorm) that are very useful for teaching purposes, they require building and programming robots (and it’s really cool). But I think it’s also useful in everyday research, because it’s so easy to build anything and it’s very versatile. I have a colleague who used lego to build a little holder for a tissue sample.

For your second question:
One of my projects involved growing mini-organs in a dish. To do this, I needed to put cells in a special type of gel (called Matrigel) that gives cells the right support (both chemically as physically) to grow into something 3D rather than in a flat layer. Because this gel is pretty expensive, I needed to find a system that allowed me to only use a small volume, but also have it accessible for the probe I was using to image. I only need ~ 40 µL (1/25th of a mL, so a tiny amount!) to fill a LEGO-well.