Lambda Hack Basel
A one-day hackathon in Basel's most advanced and affordable DIY Laboratory
Five tracks. Real lab. Open science.
Five Tracks
Pick your lane. Wet lab, compute, hardware, equipment hacking, or bring your own project.
Wet Lab
Clone, transfect, engineer. BSL-1 lab space with cloning reagents, enzymes, and cell lines from Lambda Biolab stock. Every entrant gets 2 weeks of Lambda Biolab bench access after the event to finish their results.
Suggestions
- ·Drug screening reporter system design
- ·Human cell transfection and engineering (HEK293T/17)
- ·Genetic engineering of bacterial or fungal cells for biomanufacturing
Prize
2 × 1 month free Lambda Biolab bench membership (see Results Round)
Dev
Predict, dock, evolve. 32-core i9 with RTX 4090 available on-site (shared, time-sliced), plus cloud GPU credits for heavier workloads.
Suggestions
- ·Protein structure prediction and rational design
- ·Molecular docking and virtual drug screening pipelines
- ·AI-driven protein engineering and directed evolution
- ·Self-improving, autonomous AI agents for scientific workflows
- ·Computational design of synthetic gene circuits
Prize
vast.ai GPU rental credit
Robotics
Build, wire, actuate. 3D printers available at Lambda Biolab throughout the event.
Suggestions
- ·SO-101 general-purpose robotics build
- ·Custom lab automation and liquid-handling rigs
- ·Sensor integration for environmental or biological monitoring
- ·3D-printed labware and open-source instrument design
Prize
1 month free Starship Factory access
Lab Equipment Hacking
Crack open the black box. Reverse-engineer, modify, or extend real lab instruments — firmware, protocols, and hardware alike.
Suggestions
- ·Open-source firmware modification for lab instruments
- ·Serial/USB/CAN protocol reverse engineering
- ·DIY spectrophotometer, biosensor, or reader builds
- ·Lab automation controller hacking and integration
Prize
1 month free Lambda Biolab bench membership
Bring Your Own Topic
Your project, our support. Bring an existing project at the intersection of biology, hardware, or data science.
Suggestions
- ·Longevity and healthspan research tools
- ·Biotech startup MVPs and proof-of-concepts
- ·Developer tools, CLIs, or open-source libraries for science
- ·Hardware prototypes — electronics, mechatronics, anything physical
Prize
1 month free Bolt or Vercel Pro
The Lab
Riehenstrasse 14, 4058 Basel — a real bench, real equipment, real science.
Schedule
Date TBD
Doors open, coffee, setup
Thaw & equilibrate
Welcome + track intros
Digest & ligate
Hacking begins
Transform
Lunch break
Incubate (37 °C, communal)
Resume hacking
Colony growth
Soft deadline — wrap up, prep demos
Screen colonies
Demos + judging
Gel verification · 5–7 min per team
Day-of awards
Sequence confirmed
Casual drinks & hangout
Glycerol stock & freeze
Results Round
Biology doesn't ship in six hours. Wet Lab has two judging moments — Best Plan on the day, Best Result two weeks later.
- 01
Day-of — Best Plan
Wet Lab teams present their experimental design, execution-so-far, and whatever has grown by 16:00. See the Schedule for timing.
- 02
14-day results window
Two weeks to finish growth, verification, imaging, and analysis back in the lab.
- 03
Results submission
Submit a pull request to your hackathon repo with a RESULTS.md, figures, and any raw data. Hard cutoff: 14 days after the hackathon, 23:59 CET.
- 04
Best Result award
Judged by Lambda Biolab staff. Prize: 1 month free Lambda Biolab bench membership plus a published writeup on lambdabiolab.com.
Non–Wet Lab teams who finish long-running work (model training, fabrication, firmware field tests) after the event are welcome to push results to their repo and tell us. Standout late submissions get a featured writeup on lambdabiolab.com — no formal prize, just recognition.
Location
Riehenstrasse 14, 4058 Basel
Rules & Requirements
Keep it honest, keep it open, keep it real.
Lab Rules
Lab Safety & Conduct
4
BSL-1 only
All wet-lab work must stay within Biosafety Level 1. No BSL-2 or higher organisms, and no primary human samples.
No viral vectors
No mammalian viral vectors (lentivirus, retrovirus, AAV, adenovirus, etc.). Non-viral transfection reagents are provided.
PPE required
Lab coat, gloves, and closed-toe shoes at the bench. Safety glasses when handling UV, sharps, or chemicals.
Follow lab SOPs
Wet-lab teams must attend the short safety induction at 09:15 before bench access — dry-lab tracks don't need to. Follow posted SOPs for waste disposal, equipment use, and end-of-session clean-up. Staff decisions on safety are final.
Project Rules
Submission Requirements
9
Public repos only
Every project must live in a public Git repository — GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, or any other public host. A public mirror of a private working repo is fine as long as all hackathon commits are visible there.
Commit everything before the deadline
All hackathon-day work must be committed and pushed before the 16:00 soft deadline. We verify progress via commit timestamps — no retroactive pushes, force-pushes, or history rewrites to hackathon-day commits after the deadline.
Results Round commits are allowed
During the 14-day Results Round, new commits adding RESULTS.md, figures, and analysis are expected and explicitly allowed. Do not edit or rewrite hackathon-day commits — add new ones.
Starter templates available
If you need a starting point, we will provide starter repo templates for common use cases. Using a template counts as starting fresh, not as a pre-built project.
eLabFTW for wet-lab work
Wet-lab teams record day-of bench work in Lambda Biolab's eLabFTW — protocol instances, reagents, gel and plate photos, timestamped entries. It's faster than Git for notebook work and gives judges a proper audit trail.
Link the notebook from your repo
Your eLabFTW experiments must be set to public share before the submission cutoff, and the repo README must link to each relevant experiment. If the judges can't open the notebook from the repo, it doesn't count.
Continuing an existing project is allowed
You may continue work on a project started before the hackathon. Declare it in the Luma registration form (there's an optional field for the existing-project README link) so judges know what to scope out.
Pre-built projects must be clearly labelled
Your README must clearly document what existed before the hackathon and what you plan to add during it. Judges only evaluate progress made on the hackathon day and during the 14-day Results Round — nothing that existed before kickoff counts.
Topic alignment
Bring Your Own Topic projects must clearly connect to biology, computation, hardware, or lab science. General SaaS apps or unrelated products are not eligible.
Code Quality & Spirit
4
Understand your architecture
You should be able to walk a judge through how your project is structured, why you made the key decisions, and how the pieces fit together. Sprawling auto-generated codebases with no author comprehension are not in the spirit of the event.
You own your project
AI coding assistants (Claude, Copilot, Cursor) are welcome — use them freely. You remain the author: you drove the design and can defend the choices.
AI API credits provided
Claude and OpenRouter API credits are available to all participants. Allocation announced at kickoff. Use them well and intentionally.
Pipeline over finished outcome
Judges weigh the quality of your plan, pipeline, and signal — not whether the final number is in. A Dev team shows the architecture and early training curves; Wet Lab shows the design and what has grown so far.
Code of Conduct
6
Be kind, be useful
Treat fellow hackers, organizers, and Lambda Biolab staff with respect. Help your neighbours, share equipment graciously, and assume good faith. We're all here to learn and build.
Zero tolerance for harassment
No harassment, discrimination, or hostile behaviour on any axis — race, gender, orientation, nationality, religion, disability, or anything else. Organizers may remove anyone violating this rule from the event without refund.
No NSFW or adult content
Projects, demos, slides, and presentations must be safe-for-work. No adult, sexual, or gratuitously violent content in submissions or live demos.
Nothing harmful or illegal
No weapons, malware, exploit kits, doxxing tools, scrapers targeting private data, or anything designed to harm people, systems, or organizations. No illegal activity under Swiss law.
No attacks on third-party systems
No DDoS, unauthorized penetration testing, credential stuffing, or scraping against systems you don't own. Stay within the bounds of every API's terms of service. If you're unsure, ask an organizer.
Respect the lab and the building
Lambda Biolab is a working laboratory in a residential building. Keep noise reasonable, don't wander into off-limits areas, clean up after yourself, and follow staff instructions immediately.
Disclaimer
Rules may be updated or clarified at any time before the event. The organizers reserve the right to interpret ambiguous situations at their sole discretion — including disqualifying entries that violate the spirit of the rules even if not the letter. Prizes are subject to availability and may be substituted with alternatives of equal or greater value. Lambda Biolab and Lamb Consulting accept no liability for any incidents during or related to the event, except where mandatory Swiss law provides otherwise. Participation constitutes agreement with all rules and any subsequent updates.
Register
Free to attend. Space is limited by bench count — registration closes when we hit capacity.
Register on Luma