The suits think you can’t do biotech out in the garage. But the suits are wrong.

Meet Eri Gentry, queen of the bio-curious. In 2009, after the recession hit and every biotech company around was going belly up, Gentry went shopping. She picked up over a million dollars worth of lab equipment for $30,000 (around £20,000), installed it in her garage and invited her friends over to play. And her friends invited their friends and pretty soon Gentry was at the front end of the DIY biology movement.

Read the rest of the article at Wired:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/15/eri-gentry-garage-biotech-revolution

More information about BioCurious at: http://www.biocurious.org

Jacob Shiach over at opensciencefund.org has been organizing a t-shirt design contest. The proceeds are split between diybio.org and opensciencefund.org and the winning designer gets $100 and a free shirt.

Jacob says:

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to vote for the first DIYbio t-shirt until June 6th at midnight when the ballot will close and the winning design will be announced.

The Ballot is located at here.

For those that want to make sure they get in on the first batch pre-orders are available at a discounted $10 at etsy.com.

Here are some of the submitted designs:

p.s. the last is a design that is probably impractical to print by yours truly and was “submitted” on July 2, so it might not officially be in the running.

This month, Keegan Cooke brought materials to prototype several Microbial Fuel Cell kits he’s developing, I demoed my updated $50 arduino-controlled microscope, and Jason Bobe gave an update about the BioWeatherMap Project Alpha. He has actually got metagenomic data now.

Before the meetup, Keegan said

“I’ll bring some ingredients to put in the MFCs (soil, sugar, etc.), but I think it would be fun if you told people to bring some leftovers from their refrigerator (no more than a cup of it) and we’ll see who’s leftovers the microbes like the best (i.e. who’s leftovers generate the most power).”

What food or compost products will be converted into the most power? Can’t wait to find out. Keegan took the assembled MFCs back to his workshop for measurement. It takes a week or so for the anode’s environment to become oxygen-free, at which point the electrogenic microbes from the collected soil start colonizing the anode and “breathing” their electrons onto it.

Later, I hastily assembled the latest design for the two-axis computer-controlled slide holder. It’s designed to work with webcams that have been hacked into microscopes. Here’s a video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11139943&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

More photos are available on flickr: mine, yours.

See you next time!

If we were to get a ton ($250,000) of money via grants and donations to support the community, what should we do with it?

How many of us have made recombinant DNA?

Are there more artists here than engineers?

If you are interested in the answers, drop by diybio.org/survey and contribute your responses. Anonymized, aggregate data will be published on May 1. The survey should only take 5-10 minutes.

Give it a shot!

Cheers,
Mac

p.s., if you are the kind of person who likes to be rewarded for doing surveys, email survey@diybio.org after you finish it and we’ll see about getting you a prize (free primer synthesis, or reagents, or artwork, or something like that).

p.p.s. interested in fundraising? email survey@diybio.org

The Do-It-Yourself-Dremel-Centrifuge, DremelFuge, now nearly meets the capabilities of the best centrifuges!  As previously posted for DIYbio (in “Cathal has designed a simple centrifuge using open source hardware technology, and you can order one yourself!“), the DremelFuge is an adapter which turns a Dremel rotary-tool into a lab-quality centrifuge capable of use in various bioprotocols.

As Cathal states on the DIYbio mailing list:

“After a design revision which is now “official” and for sale on Shapeways, the Dremelfuge can hold tubes securely, with liquid load, up to the full speed of a Dremel 300. At a top speed of 33,000 RPM, this means the tubes experience about 52,000RCF (g).“

Read more

We had our first DIYBio workshop in Broad Hall on the UCLA Campus over the weekend. The student community from both north and south campus were involved, which included art and science/math majors.

Romie Littrell started things off with a short presentation on the concept and history of DIYBio. His talk kicked off discussion focusing on the safety and security of biotechnology that is open to the public.

The highlight of the workshop included an extraction of DNA from everyday food products, akin to the extraction of DNA from strawberries.

Other demos at the workshop included a sampling of a biological polymer made from cornstarch and other products found in every kitchen.  The red color and taste reminded me of Twizzlers.

Tor Nowlan and Max Belasco explain to us the elegance behind this!http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9863797&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

DIY bio Los Angeles Workshop at UCLA! February 27th, 2010 from Kenneth Wei on Vimeo.

We had a diverse group of visitors throughout the workshop over 4 hrs.  Other than science and art professionals,  a lawyer and stay-at-home mother with toddler came to participate.

Check out our Flickr page for more pictures from this specific event.  Stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the coming weeks on the next workshop and the start of our long term project!

ASPEX is a company that builds tabletop Scanning Electron Microscopes (tabletop SEMs). To promote their product, they are offering free scanning of samples to the world at large.

You can see a gallery of some of the scans they have made on their website. My favorite sample is an old stir bar some folks from chemistry-blog.com sent in. The SEM can also use x-ray fluorescence (a byproduct of electron bombardment) from the samples for elemental composition analysis (called EDS or XFR) – in the case of the stir bar, the analysts found a microscopic chunk of Chromium stuck to the surface! Leftovers from some experiments, I guess. Wow.

They emailed us recently inviting us to take advantage of their offer. It sounds pretty cool and I’m going to mail in a sample of one of Paul Stamet’s LifeBoxes.

I CAN HAZ SEM?

I also casually asked if I could possibly borrow on of their tabletop SEMs for a couple of weeks to play with here in Boston, pretty please with sugar on top? They wrote back and said yes!

So sometime this spring they are going to drop off a demo unit for a couple of weeks and we are going to have a scanning electron microscope bonanza. Hopefully it will be so cool that ASPEX will be happy to lend the unit to other local diybio groups too.

DEETS

So to mail a sample to ASPEX, check out their online instructions, print this PDF, and mail your sample to:

ASPEX Corporation
Free Sample Submissions
175 Sheffield Dr.
Delmont, PA 15626

Note: I’ve been told that they’ve gotten a lot of demand for the service and are a little backlogged, but that samples are scanned about 2-4 weeks after delivery and emailed to the sender (if you get an image back, post a link below).

Hi all,
Thought I would share a DonorsChoose.org biology project that I donated to back in December — Our Ancestors’ DNA Roots

“I teach middle school math science and history for beginning ESL students. My students originate from all parts of the globe including Sudan, Peru, Mexico, Korea, and Japan. 80% of my students receive free or reduced lunches.
Students often see subjects such as history and science as unrelated. In the community where my students live they often do not see the practical application of scientific methods in the work force. Additionally, the rich diversity of cultures makes the idea of interconnectedness especially important.

Testing our mitochondrial DNA will allow my students to trace their haplogroups and trace their ancestors migrations out of Africa. We’ll be able to find common ancestors between us and tell the history of the human race. Using the lab equipment (the conical tubes, saline solution, and kit) students will process their own DNA using the same process anthropologists and forensic experts use, giving students a real connection to science in the work force. The DNA models and evolution charts will be used to explain the processes of population shifts and explain how we can use DNA to determine common ancestors.

Your help will fund a project that connects science (through genetics), history, and math. Students will get training in DNA testing that is used by real scientists everyday. This project makes the vital concept of DNA tangible and gives my students the tools needed to access higher science subjects in high school. You will make it possible for my students to describe our common heritage as humans.

My students need 9 pieces of DNA analysis equipment such as conical tubes, saline solution, DNA models, evolution charts, and a DNA Replication and Transcription Set.”

Check out some photos from the project:
http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=341067&pmaId=264576&pmaHash=-507759220

There is a whole range of biology, biotech, and DNA related projects that you can contribute to on the Donors Choose website: http://www.donorschoose.org/

Tito