bringing labs into the field

Throughout her career, Flora Vincent’s research has been limited by the quality of her research samples. Vincent, a marine microbiologist, studies the symbiosis between microorganisms. The samples she works on are typically collected in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and preserved for further analysis at her laboratory using chemical processes that can disrupt the organisms’ natural state. It’s not ideal for a scientist hoping to learn about how these creatures thrive in their own environment.

“The minute you take it out of the system, you change it,” Vincent explains from her office at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. The problem is compounded by the nature of the microbes she studies: organisms such as plankton are constantly interacting with others in the ocean ecosystem.

So when managers at EMBL invited her and her research group to be involved with its Advanced Mobile Laboratory (AML), part of the Traversing European Coastlines (TREC) project, she was intrigued. The vehicle, a 12-metre-long customized trailer that can expand to 40 square metres of lab space, is temporarily situated in a car park about 100 metres from her lab’s building, overlooking a green pasture. But from March 2023 to July 2024, the vehicle was used to sample ecosystems around the coasts of continental Europe and the United Kingdom, starting in Roscoff, France and ending in Thrace, a region in northeast Greece. It gave researchers unprecedented access to samples for analysis (see ‘Coastal connections’).

“By moving the technology as close as possible to the biology that we want to study, we can all of a sudden see a whole new view of life, because we can find things that we couldn’t find before, interactions between organisms,” says Niko Leisch, the operational manager of EMBL mobile services. As he walks me through the lab, he explains each piece of technology: microscopes and cell sorters of various kinds, and an aluminium-floored area dedicated to electron-microscopy sample preparation, fitted with a heavy-duty high-pressure freezer, a plunge freezer and a cryo-fluorescence microscope.

Collection: Fieldwork

It’s not just heavy machinery. Many instruments are adorned with toys: a snow queen Barbie doll, an octopus crocheted by one of the AML crew members and even a Lego truck that closely resembles the vehicle.

The lab has completely revolutionized Vincent’s research. The cryopreservation — and subsequent live imaging — enabled her team to study the symbioses like never before.

“The ability to sort this high biomass and to actually preserve it using the high-pressure freezer, and then to zoom in on the molecular basis of how this happens, is completely unprecedented,” Vincent says. “I’m really fascinated by trying to understand how those organisms interact in their native context: this is what I’ve been dreaming of doing since the end of my PhD.”

Van variety

Mobile labs aren’t anything new — they were crucial to COVID-19 testing in Australia¹, for instance, and are often used when mitigating disease outbreaks such as meningitis in Benin² or Nipah virus in India³. Around the world, scientists from many disciplines are using them to find samples and conduct widespread research. The firm Zion Market Research in Pune, India, estimates that the global mobile-biosafety-lab market will grow to US$451 million by 2032.

As well as sampling what’s in the water, as seen in Vincent’s research, mobile labs are a great way to measure what’s moving around in the air.

Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland , says: “We in the atmospheric-research community often make measurements at a single place, which can give you a lot of information, but if we really want to trace what’s happening in the atmosphere, we want to move along with the air.” DeCarlo and his research team use a classic Dodge van, fitted with mass spectrometers and other instruments that measure chemicals, to see how air pollution differs across the city. The aim is to determine potential health risks for local residents, and whether “there are ways to identify where these chemicals are coming from”, he explains.

A mobile lab in Peru was crucial for a group of researchers investigating ancient DNA between January 2019 and December 2021. The vehicle contains a centrifuge, fridge and hood that enable almost instant DNA analysis.

“This lab helped us to get better sample preservation, reducing the chances of contamination or DNA degradation and eliminating the need to transport fragile samples long-distance, which is particularly critical for ancient DNA that is already degraded,” says Heinner Guio, one of the researchers involved in the project, based at the INBIOMEDIC Research and Technological Center in Lima.

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But mobile labs aren’t just for sampling the environment. They can also be used for human studies in populations that are hard to reach. In Colorado, for example, the CUChange lab has a fleet of vehicles called Cannavans to study cannabis use, an area that is difficult to study because of regulatory red tape. Current laws restrict how researchers can study legal-market cannabis use. According to Angela Bryan, a psychologist involved with the Cannavan project, visiting study participants and taking physiological, behavioural and cognitive measurements before and after they independently consume cannabis in their home enables CUChange to conduct research that is as rigorous as possible while staying within current laws and regulations.

In September, the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Morgantown, launched MAVERICK (Mobile Access Vehicle Enhancing Research and Inspiring Community Knowledge), a bus dedicated to visiting rural areas across the state to conduct clinical trials, making clinical research more inclusive and accessible to remote populations.

And in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Sophia Children’s Hospital has a minibus (called the Sophia bus), for conducting studies with children to make the research less intimidating. “It’s still scary for children to hear that they’re going to hospital for research,” says Kamil Hiralal, a PhD student in the hospital’s department of child psychiatry and one of the bus’s coordinators. “So this alleviates that a little bit.”

By extending the area that the bus covers, the sample of eligible participants becomes more diverse. “From a research perspective, we can include more children, because we can include people from farther away,” Hiralal says. “Now you can actually start going around the country a little bit, and your sample usually becomes more generalizable.”

Mobile labs don’t always have to be on vehicles. The East African Community mobile laboratory network⁴, which assists with both disease-outbreak mitigation and research, consists of box-based labs that can be distributed across partner states.

Power struggles

Although mobile labs make certain aspects of the scientific process easier and more standardized, they come with a host of challenges.

“It’s really rewarding when it works,” says DeCarlo. “But when something breaks in the mobile lab, you have to try to get it out, take it apart, put it back together, and it makes it harder to do some of the basic maintenance.”

There are special considerations and logistics for mobile labs that are different from those of a stationary lab. “It starts with the parking space,” Leisch says. “We need a place to actually park a 25-tonne, 12-metre-long trailer.” The spot also has to be level so that the lab equipment is aligned.

Then there’s the question of how to power the equipment. The AML taps into a local grid for power and water, so, before heading to each location, the team had to ensure that there was a way to access these. But other mobile labs rely on generators or solar energy to power their instruments when driving around. The equipment can also give off heat, so there needs to be a cooling mechanism.

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