Posts by Jason Bobe

Doing the infamous dna extraction

If you’re in the Boston area, drop by the Cambridge Science Festival between noon and 4:00pm this Saturday, April 25, to visit the DIYbio table! We’ll be in the tent at the opening Science Carnival – see the Cambridge Science Festival’s schedule for details.

Mac Cowell, Sandra Porter, and Meredith Patterson (who wrote her thoughts on the show) were in a fascinating discussion about DIYbio on the Food Chain weekly radio program with Michael Olson this morning. The audio will be available to download soon.

Howdy DIYbioers! Thanks for stopping by. Here are a few highlights from the past week:

Discussions and happenings this week

DIYbio in the Big Apple – The NYC DIYbio group had a meetup on March 9th, and has started a blog and YouTube channel.

Basics of gel electrophoresis – Dan Heidel gives an excellent and readable rundown of the basics of gel electrophoresis.

Biology forums – Ellen Jorgensen and Bryan Bishop shared a set of forums where anyone can ask technical questions about their work. Ellen recommended the (very active) forums from Biotechniques magazine, and Bryan shared a comprehensive list of other related forums.

Citizen science for climate and plants – Cory Tobin shared a call for citizen scientists from the Nature Climate Feedback blog, which may be of interest to some DIYbio scientists, along with a podcast from the US Geological Survey about the program.

Do your biology in space – Jonathan Cline mentioned CubeSat, a platform for 10 cm^3, 1 kg satellite projects, and included links to design specifications as well as information about a developer meetup in April.

Projects for the Amateur Scientist – Jason Morrison shared a link to a PDF of C.L. Stong’s Projects for the Amateur Scientist (1960), which contains several very approachable amateur biology protocols.

Get your DIYbio any way you like it!

The DIYbio mailing list is a great resource and full of vibrant discussion, but sometimes it’s a bit much to handle. Luckily, you can edit your subscription settings and elect to receive only daily digests, or turn off email entirely and catch up on discussion at your own pace by reading the DIYbio mailing list online.

As an alternative, you can subscribe to the very low-traffic DIYbio Announce list, which has less than five messages per week.

Lastly, for those of you on Twitter, come follow DIYbio on Twitter! We’ll tweet interesting information, letting you know about big DIYbio publications, news, and events.

So, until next week, keep experimenting, keep safe, and keep sharing your science!
— Jason M.