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

Do-it-yourself biology on the rise - 20 Dec 2009 - SF Chronicle (pdf)

SF Chronicle reporter Juliane Guthrie interviews Tito Jankowski, Phil Ross, Jason Bobe, and Raymond McCauley about the DIYbio projects they are working on. They also interviewed Drew Endy about safety and regulatory concerns.  The article is online at SFgate.com.

One of the article’s main thrusts is concerned with safety and regulation, or the lack thereof. I know diybio-nyc has been thinking about it and is organizing a round-table in a month or so, and I’ve been throwing a couple of ideas around with people here in boston. Maybe it’s time to set up a safety working group to synthesize the community’s thoughts on the issue with pointers to relevant resources. Is anyone doing this already (there’s some info in the faq).

Happy holidays, Mac

hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray"

Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage with John Schloendorn concerning his DIY SENS lab and biotech co-working space in the Bay Area.

Andrew Hessel wrote another article called “Why DIY Bio” in which he explains his vision, based on open source & synthetic biology principles, for a distributed, open anti-cancer research collective. He calls it Pink Army.

UPDATE: slashdotted on 26 Jan 2010.

• Yashas Shetty wants to organize an international DIY microscope building session and subsequent videoconference for early December based on his DIY Microscope guide.  See http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DIY_microscopy for instructions


• Alex Hornstein told us he had just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and wanted to synthesize his own insulin, DIY-style. Would we help? Hell yes! A grad student from Harvard who had dropped in pointed out that the Registry of Standard Biological Parts already has an insulin-generating biobrick. Alex and the grad student went off to talk.This is radical self-actualized DIY theraputics. Extremely controversial.


• A variety of brave souls volunteered to start writing for the (so far, low-volume) blog at diybio.org in an attempt to amplify the signal that inevitably gets lost in the noise on the diybio mailing list and in the DIYbio ecosystem of blogs. Want to help? Email contact@diybio.org for an account.


• volunteers from each DIYbio region present (Ellen from NYC, Tito from SF, Paul from MIT & myself from Boston) thought it would be useful to describe the organizational blueprint for the local group in a central place, perhaps on the new forums, for comparisons sake and to help new groups bootstrap more intelligently and more quickly.


• Alec Nielsen, myself, Jason Bobe, David Thompson, and iGEM volunteer from MSU, and the DIYbio-NYC folks all were excited about developing a standard DIY-friendly DNA barcoding protocol. 16s rDNA sequencing of soil microbes was the initial suggestion, followed by interest in plant barcoding, in which sample collection and genome isolation may potentially be easier (using the COI gene).


• I announced the Boston Open Source Science Lab, a volunteer research center where PhDs and amateurs can work together to develop and document low-cost, low-waste “open source” tools and techniques for biotechnology and synthetic biology. 12-month goal: build and distribute one unencumbered (IP-free or freely-licensed) BioBrick under the new BioBrick Public Agreement to the DIYbio community, preferably a device with an obvious and fun phenotype.  In the process develop comprehensive and practical resources and protocols for DIY biobrick creation and use that bridge the gap between high-school and PhD-level lab instructional material.  Along the way, we’ll figure out how to make it all financially sustainable with a combination of workshop tuition, membership fees, donations, and grants.  We might even be able to put together some DIY kits.

Glofish fluoresce -- green, red, and orange!

Among other topics, we chatted a lot about Glofish — the genetically modified zebrafish that fluoresce under blue light. Some of us are aquarium-lovers and others are molecular biology-lovers, so we wondered out loud about everything from how to best display glofish to the low level molecular biology that goes into creating modified zebrafish.

We also got into other cool topics about interfacing computers and biology. Rachel from the Cyborg group at Noisebridge described “eyes on the back of your head” — a motion sensing jacket she’s working on. Here’s a great article from Wired about “adding senses”.

I’ve uploaded the slides from the “Intro to DIYbio segment” to scribd. The focus was on the software, wetware, and hardware in DIYbio — and how projects like Arduino allow computers to interact with the real world: DIYbio Salon  (Powerpoint)

If you have any questions, or would like to attend the next DIYbio Salon, let me know. Thanks to everyone at Noisebridge for providing space for the DIYbio Salon to get started!

Tito

Step 1. Planning our experiment

The pressure cooker shot out steam, like an enormous teapot. At over 200˚F, steam had just sterilized our liquid agar, the favorite food of growing cells.

We’re on our way to make glowing cells with the Carolina Sciences “Green Gene Colony Transformation Kit” (aka E. Coli K-12 + a GFP plasmid). This first step for DIYbio SF was a long time in the making!

Step 2: Josh measures and mixes LB agar

At the beginning of March, Praveen and Marnia began working with Noisebridge, a local hackerspace, to put together a Lab Safety and Ethics page. Tim ordered the Carolina kit and stored it at his apartment. Micah offered to donate a fridge, Meredith volunteered her pressure cooker , and Marnia brought a digital scale.

This past weekend, 5 DIYbiologists met at Noisebridge in the Mission district: Marnia, Josh, Tim, Micah, and myself, Tito.

Step 3: Marnia turns on the pressure cooker

We started the session by cleaning out a fridge donated by Micah and talking through the safety aspects of our tools and materials. We agreed that any broken glassware would need to be cleaned up immediately and Marnia showed us how the pressure cooker worked.

To the right, you can see the 4 steps that we took in order to make our plates. Marnia will be seeding the E. Coli K-12 on these plates and we will be adding our GFP DNA plasmid to these cells during our next session.

We will be completing this kit over 3 “Glow in the Dark” sessions:

Step 4: Pour and refrigerate agar plates

1. Making Agar Plates
2. Growing glowing GFP cells
3. Visualizing DNA with Electrophoresis

Kit: Carolina Green Gene Colony Transformation ($49)

Materials used: Petri dishes LB Agar

Equipment used: Gloves Scale Pressure Cooker Flask

DIYbio is a new and exciting topic — as a community we focus on making science safe and approachable by understanding our materials, following safe practices, and tackling tough issues like public perception. As well, remember these important areas outside of the science itself, especially when working in someone else’s space: schedule space with the owner, get everything approved, and say many “thanks” afterwards!

Thank you to Noisebridge for hosting us as we boot-up DIYbio SF!

Our project was accepted for the MAKE Magazine “Maker Faire“ — we’ll be showing off our cells from May 29-May 31st in San Jose, California!