Would it make sense to create a group to look for entrepreneurial opportunities in biotech?

[Anouar Tahiri]

I'm building one right now.
Join if you're interested!

https://www.facebook.com/Genrevolution

“If you ask me to make a prediction of where the next Googles are coming from, the next hundred billion dollar companies are coming from, it’s from this world, this world of biotech. Not fifty years from now. Now. This next decade.”
-Peter Diamandis
Co-founder of X Prize, Singularity University
Co-author of Abundance: The future is better than you think

[Nathaniel Chen]

Awesome! How about a google group too?

[Nathan McCorkle]

Oh yay (sarcasm) another splitering of pertainent info that could just be posted here.

On Jul 25, 2013 4:38 PM, "Nathaniel Chen" <nathani...@gmail.com> wrote:

Awesome! How about a google group too?

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[John Griessen]

On 07/25/2013 06:54 PM, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
> another splintering of pertinent info that could just be posted here.

Yes, here is good. The amount of business-of-lab-gear interest is low,
but talk of tech/humanity/concept stuff always gets a flurry of talking going.

[Nathaniel Chen]

> The amount of business-of-lab-gear interest is low

I am very interested to hear what sort of tools DIY biologists would like but don't have or don't exist. Any particular friction points / equipment that is prohibitively expensive?

[jarlemag]

At the top of my list would a (comparatively) low-cost microplate reader for fluorescence and absorbance measurements. Having a microplate reader enables medium-throughput experiments investigating production levels of fluorescent proteins, so you can start designing and analyzing genetic circuits with fluorescent protein production as the output. On eBay, microplate readers sell in the $1000 USD + range, which is not that bad, but having an Open Hardware solution would still be positive, I think.

-JP

[Nathaniel Chen]

> At the top of my list would a (comparatively) low-cost microplate reader for fluorescence and absorbance measurements. Having a microplate reader enables medium-throughput experiments investigating

> production levels of fluorescent proteins, so you can start designing and analyzing genetic circuits with fluorescent protein production as the output. 

Certainly!

I also wonder if a low-cost, all-in one automatic pipette would be useful to anyone?

[John Griessen]

On 07/26/2013 01:58 PM, jarlemag wrote:
> At the top of my list would a (comparatively) low-cost microplate reader for fluorescence and absorbance measurements.

Is there a model you like?
What is the feature list you need?
What accuracy do you demand?
Can you get by with precision and repeatability but lower accuracy, where you must include a control
and use relative measurements to the control location?
How much more would you pay for a reader
with its own internal control reference that readings are relative to?

John

[jarlemag]

The only one I'm personally acquainted with is the Tecan Infinite 200 PRO.  I don't know the general market, so I'm not able to compare it to other products. I've seen a used one listed for sale at about $4000 USD. I don't know if it's realistic to produce a knockoff at that price, but it would be plausably within purchasing range of both persons and small labs doing DIY bio, at least. If the price would go higher, then I guess it would be better to go hunting for a used instrument

The essential features would be:

*Ability to load 96-well plates.
Ability to perform fluorescence measurements using adjustable excitation and emission wavelengths
*Ability to measure absorbance at 600 nm.

Nice to have features:
*Temperature control/heating
*Shaking
*Rapid measurements (ability to perform measurements on every well within, say, 5 minutes)

An accuracy to within 1 % should be sufficient, but I imagine the achievable accuracy would depend heavily on signal strength.
With the Tecan reader mentioned you can either use automatic gain optimization (to get the highest accuracy), or fix the gain manually to allow comparison between different measurements and when running a time-series experiment (incubating a sample in the reader), there's an automatic gain adjustment option which automatically  decreases the gain in case of saturation. I've always used a control sample (blank growth medium and/or wildtype cells). I don't know about any way to relate absolute fluorescence to protein concentration (for example) in cells, so measurements are always relative/measured in arbitrary units anyway.

An internal control reference sounds like a good idea. But I have no idea about how such things work, really.

For reference, here's a page on the Infinite m200 : http://www.biocompare.com/20131-Microplate-Reader-ELISA-Plate-Reader/343356-Infinitereg-M200/

I'm speaking only from my own, very limited experience. I'm sure there are some people on this list who knows a lot more about this kind of instruments.
Again, I'm sure there are lots of complex details about signal detection and processing, but I don't know anything about that.
So, I know about what the *practical* need is, but I think someone else would be better able to describe the technical requirements.

Cheers,
JP