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It's still fairly hard to do in a living room, if you want to do anything novel. You need probably low 4-figures of equipment first; a -20C freezer for DNA/buf
by leggomylibro 9y ago
It's still fairly hard to do in a living room, if you want to do anything novel.
You need probably low 4-figures of equipment first; a -20C freezer for DNA/buffer storage, small centrifuge, thermal cycler, some way of getting genes into a target, and incubation space for whatever you're modifying. Preferably you'll also have consistent temperature control and an extremely clean environment. You also need a source of primer sequences, which are short customized sequences of DNA used to tl;dr get a lot of copies of a DNA sequence which you only have in small quantities.
Nothing too difficult, and much of that equipment can be DIY'd for the home lab. But many chemical suppliers also won't ship to residential addresses or onboard individuals as customers, so you'll need to incorporate and shop around a bit. And wet lab protocols can be very finicky; you'll probably need to run through your workflow a lot before you get to the point where you can semi-reliably go from start to finish without fucking up. Often, you won't know exactly how you fucked up, but you can't argue with a lack of results.
It's possible, I think, but it's also time-consuming and difficult.
Anyways, if you did get a reliable setup working with say, micropropagated plant specimens, there are far more interesting prizes than seeing what non-coding DNA does. Plants make all kinds of cool stuff, from scents to flavors to alkaloids. And they've demonstrated an ability to take genes from things like jellyfish for e.g. autoluminescence, too.
- peter303 9y agoThere is the bio-maker movement, sometimes called biolabs, that puts fairly elaborate biotech in the hands of unaffiliated researchers and hobbyists. I wouldn't be surprised to see homebrew CRISPR at science fairs in the near future. https://www.meetup.com/denverbiolabs/ https://www.meetup.com/denverbiolabs/
- leggomylibro 9y agoThat's a good point; community labs and bio makerspaces have great potential to help make this more accessible to us lay people!
- feelix 9y agoIndeed. And the thing I linked to (the odin) does allow you to do CRISPR in your living room for $150, as I said in my original comment.
- Blackthorn 9y ago> And they've demonstrated an ability to take genes from things like jellyfish for e.g. autoluminescence, too. This almost feels like bikeshedding but...to be fair, pretty much the first thing anybody does with a new work organism in biotech is make it glow and it's been that way long before CRISPR! There's just something about it that people find irresistible.
- leggomylibro 9y agoSure, and the autoluminescent plants experiment didn't use CRISPR; I was just pointing out how versatile plants are. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015461 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- dragonwriter 9y ago> There's just something about it that people find irresistible. It's cheap to verify and demonstrate success, so it's a natural first, or at least early, application.
- mpatobin 9y agoIts like making a todo app in a new language
- dekhn 9y agoI lost decades of my life chasing the dream of making things glow (more specifically: general germline mutation based on engineering). I agree the glowing tobacco plant was a sexy introduction to gene modification. Unfortunately doing anything non-trivial and actually useful (beyond the 'hello world' of a glowing plant) is really challenging.
- madengr 9y agoCould the genes that produce THC be spliced into common lawn grass?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoSplice the gene directly in to your liver stem cells and be done with the middle-man once and for all.
- leggomylibro 9y agoYes, and they're all characterized. It would be difficult, though; you're looking at about a half-dozen genes for the intermediary steps from something common like acetyl-coa. But with just THC, it probably wouldn't mimic the effects of cannabis very well. There wouldn't be any CBD, terpenes, etc etc. Still, you could do it. It'd probably be easiest with something like tobacco which is well-understood and already has a system for sequestering cytotoxins. Doubt you'd get something with appreciable yield stably transfected before wider legalization hits, though. And that would be some expensive pot.
- twic 9y agoDMT would probably be the easiest. It's only three steps from tryptophan, and I believe ask the enzymes are pretty simple.
- gopalv 9y agoThat is the stuff of urban legends ... http://www.fleeb.com/rant/pot.html http://www.fleeb.com/rant/pot.html
- cma 9y ago> a -20C freezer for DNA/buffer storage, How about dry ice from the grocery store?