5 ms·

> Give me 200 bucks and an ebay account and I can buy a lab that will run circles around this crippled mess. Could you go into more detail about this? I'd love

by haliax 11y ago

> Give me 200 bucks and an ebay account and I can buy a lab that will run circles around this crippled mess. Could you go into more detail about this? I'd love to know how to build a lab on the cheap. Can you get genetic material for bacterial transformation within a K-12 budget as well?

searine 11y ago
> Can you get genetic material for bacterial transformation within a K-12 budget as well? For a standard bacterial transformation experiment you'll need : An incubator, a pcr machine, taq, primers, pcr master mix, a centrifuge, petri plates, LB broth, agar, ecoli, a gel box. Honestly, half of this you could get as cast-offs from your local university for free. Universities are all about supporting K-12 science, you just have to ask. Hardware is going to run you about 200-300 bucks. The real expense here is the used PCR machine. The incubator, and the centrifuge can be home-made or repurposed (ie a hand crank centrifuge, and a chicken egg incubator). The rest of the cost is just reagents. The two big things you need to make yourself are Taq, and ecoli competent cells. Both of these are fun experiments in themselves are can be made for 50-100 bucks (resulting in years worth of reagents). After that it's just buying primers (10-20 bucks a pop) and refills on reagents like agarose and LB which are cheap. DIY lab doesn't have to be expensive if you are willing to sacrifice a little bit of time.
- ohblahitsme 11y ago
  True. The problem with DIY labs I think is the barrier to entry. It's really hard to start from nothing to having a DIY lab where you have some idea of what's going on. Maybe an online lab (videos?) is the way to go? My microbio and biotech labs in college did serve me pretty well as far as knowing what the bands in my gel mean, etc.
  - ehtll 11y ago
    Arcturus BioCloud are doing an cloud lab geared towards DIY biology: https://www.arcturus.io/ https://www.arcturus.io/
  - searine 11y ago
    >Maybe an online lab (videos?) is the way to go? Check out the Journal of Visualized Experiments : http://www.jove.com/ http://www.jove.com/
- dekhn 11y ago
  I just went through the exercise of outfitting my home lab, and I think $200-300 is a bit low. Most of the stuff on ebay that goes super-cheap is just broken. You'll spend a lot of time debugging and fixing stuff that is unrelated to your experiment. For the centrifuge, I'd do 3d-printed rotor on a dremel (https://diybio.org/tag/3d-printing/ https://diybio.org/tag/3d-printing/) I use this already to spin down cells and is... cheap and not very safe. You didn't mention an autoclave- that's needed to make sure all your buffers and equipment aren't contaminated.
  - searine 11y ago
    > I think $200-300 is a bit low I agree, but you could could get a few basic experiments going for that much. Much much more if you spent 800, like you would on this kit. >You didn't mention an autoclave Good point. The only stuff you would really HAVE to autoclave would be media, and you can use an off the shelf pressure cooker for that.
    - dekhn 11y ago
      I think you want to autoclave the glassware, since it comes in contact with the media when you're growing up a culture.

by haliax 11y ago

searine 11y ago

> Can you get genetic material for bacterial transformation within a K-12 budget as well? For a standard bacterial transformation experiment you'll need : An incubator, a pcr machine, taq, primers, pcr master mix, a centrifuge, petri plates, LB broth, agar, ecoli, a gel box. Honestly, half of this you could get as cast-offs from your local university for free. Universities are all about supporting K-12 science, you just have to ask. Hardware is going to run you about 200-300 bucks. The real expense here is the used PCR machine. The incubator, and the centrifuge can be home-made or repurposed (ie a hand crank centrifuge, and a chicken egg incubator). The rest of the cost is just reagents. The two big things you need to make yourself are Taq, and ecoli competent cells. Both of these are fun experiments in themselves are can be made for 50-100 bucks (resulting in years worth of reagents). After that it's just buying primers (10-20 bucks a pop) and refills on reagents like agarose and LB which are cheap. DIY lab doesn't have to be expensive if you are willing to sacrifice a little bit of time.

ohblahitsme 11y ago
True. The problem with DIY labs I think is the barrier to entry. It's really hard to start from nothing to having a DIY lab where you have some idea of what's going on. Maybe an online lab (videos?) is the way to go? My microbio and biotech labs in college did serve me pretty well as far as knowing what the bands in my gel mean, etc.
- ehtll 11y ago
  Arcturus BioCloud are doing an cloud lab geared towards DIY biology: https://www.arcturus.io/ https://www.arcturus.io/
- searine 11y ago
  >Maybe an online lab (videos?) is the way to go? Check out the Journal of Visualized Experiments : http://www.jove.com/ http://www.jove.com/
dekhn 11y ago
I just went through the exercise of outfitting my home lab, and I think $200-300 is a bit low. Most of the stuff on ebay that goes super-cheap is just broken. You'll spend a lot of time debugging and fixing stuff that is unrelated to your experiment. For the centrifuge, I'd do 3d-printed rotor on a dremel (https://diybio.org/tag/3d-printing/ https://diybio.org/tag/3d-printing/) I use this already to spin down cells and is... cheap and not very safe. You didn't mention an autoclave- that's needed to make sure all your buffers and equipment aren't contaminated.
- searine 11y ago
  > I think $200-300 is a bit low I agree, but you could could get a few basic experiments going for that much. Much much more if you spent 800, like you would on this kit. >You didn't mention an autoclave Good point. The only stuff you would really HAVE to autoclave would be media, and you can use an off the shelf pressure cooker for that.
  - dekhn 11y ago
    I think you want to autoclave the glassware, since it comes in contact with the media when you're growing up a culture.