Posts by Jason Bobe

Howdy, DIYbio! Here are some great threads that have sprung up in the last two weeks. Do discuss!

SageBase – Sean Zuzu mentioned that Merck just pledged a ton of high-resolution, very expensive data to the public domain, along with some software and other resources to make it work.

Legislation – Daniel Crookston posited that DIYbio is eventually going to face government regulation, and that we should consider the shape of self-regulation. Drew Souza, who “is involved in the federal government’s current efforts to address the risks posed by synthetic biology,” weighs in.

DIY competent cells – Sgt. York proposes DIY protocols for making competent cells, and many folks join in. There’s also a discussion of winning cheap electroporators on eBay.

What are Minipreps, anyway? Cory Tobin and Dan Heidel discourse on a variety of methods for purifying plasmid dna, including “salting out” with ethanol precipitation, chloroform precipitation, and CsCl ultracentrifugation.

DIYbio and Syn Bio software – Jason Morrison asks what kinds of software people would like to see or are currently working on. An open-source alternative to VectorNTI seems to be a popular want. Clotho is a great start, and a project that people should contribute to. Clotho has been described as A Plasmid Editor” for BioBricks.

Lego tube shaker – Douglas Ridgway shares a Lego tube shaker that his son built, and Andrew Hessel and Bryan Bishop chip in with suggestions for furthering the prototype and a DIYbio Kids group and Saturday morning show.

Well, that’s it for DIYbio – if you’re up for cooking up a batch of Ultimate Breakfast Sausage or Chocolate Enchiladas, you should check out this week’s MAKE Blog “Weekend Builder” email in my inbox. But if you’re up for cooking up a batch of RFP or gel boxes, let us DIYbioers know!

Happy (very) belated New Year, DIYbioers! I want to recount some of the exciting high points of the past few months, and share some hopes for 2009.

Local groups outside the Boston area are sprouting up and folks are getting some quality kitchen table time, as my friend Justin calls it. DIYbio Seattleites had their first meetup, about which Sandy Porter published an excellent article, and Bay Area DIYbiologists met up in San Francisco. If you are looking to start or join a local group, add an entry to the Local Groups page.

There’s been a surge of new interest as several articles and blog posts were published. We’re more than 500 members on the mailing list, which is very exciting! I had an idea that there were hundreds (if not thousands) of enthusiastic amateur biologists out there, and it’s great to see them coming together. I’d love to see a DIYbio conference during 2009, and get to meet all you DIYbioers in person. CodeCon 2009 will be another great chance to do just this, with a new Biohack! track that is currently in open CFP.

Several projects have also sprung up and are progressing in earnest, including building a melamine biosensor, probiotics that produce vitamin C, cheap and open source biology tools, and the seeds of one or more DIYbio iGEM teams. Hardware projects have sprung up as well, with an open-source turbidostat, the Gel Box 2.0 project, and integration/UX research going on with Project SmartLab.

The BioWeatherMap project has enjoyed quite significant progress, and will soon become a PersonalGenomes.org project in collaboration with DIYbio. This is great news, and I hope to see the BioWeatherMap take off over the next few months.

I’m really pumped about this, and look forward to seeing all of the fantastic projects come to fruition!

A couple days ago, I met up with Randy Hall and Dan Heidel. I hadn’t met Dan before, but he heard about the recent Seattle meeting and got in touch. He’s this really smart dude who is currently in the process of setting up Seattle Open Biolabs, a wetlab adjacent to a hackerspace he’s a part of, Hackerbot. The lab isn’t huge, but it will be available to competent researchers that want to do their own bio R&D.

It’s pretty exciting, because I’ve been talking to the University of Washington about allowing public use of their facilities for DIYbio. That has its own set of hurdles, especially once you get into the realm of IP. So, Dan setting up his lab and needing interested parties, then finding out about DIYbio is perfect timing.

The next Seattle DIYbio meeting will be at Dan’s house in two weeks, and we’re going to advertise it far and wide. I’ll keep you guys posted, and Dan should be sending a message to the list pretty soon. Cool stuff.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

-Alec Nielsen