Scientists have used 3D-printed components to create a robotic instrument that can autonomously monitor the earliest stages of development in any aquatic species.

It can be used to track embryonic development, a fundamental biological process that underpins the diversity of life on Earth, and provides an accessible and scalable means of visualising and measuring this process in large numbers of embryos simultaneously.

Research in understanding how the earliest stages of life are impacted by environmental conditions has heightened urgency due to environmental change, and this instrument enables scientists to measure key features in developing animals such as heart rate, developmental rate and growth.

The team has released the LabEmbryoCam as an open-source project – with both hardware and software designs freely available and detailed in a new study published in HardwareX.

This has helped them create a versatile instrument that can be applied to a broad range of research challenges, and is accessible to researchers worldwide as a platform through which they can adapt it to suit their own needs.