Hello from Great Lakes Biotech Academy

[William Beeson]

Hi guys,  

Been lurking on this message board for a little while now and want to get more involved.  

I started the Great Lakes Biotech Academy late last year in downtown Indianapolis.  The mission is to make biotechnology more accessible to young people and community members.  I'm doing this in addition to (and separate from) my day job as a scientist working in the agricultural biotech space.  My space downtown is about ~4000 square feet and I've done a ton of work getting things setup for basic biotech experiments.  I purchased equipment off of Amazon.com and I've also been trying to build pieces of equipment inspired by DIY posts.  The research area we will be focused on is filamentous fungi, specifically developing synthetic biology tools for Neurospora crassa (which I have a lot of experience with from graduate school).  

A key difference about my organization relative to most of the other community labs is that I also want to provide core skills training in biotech to young people in the 18-20 age range.  With the right mentoring, access to the key equipment, and a focus on practical skills training I think we can transform a motivated young person into a proficient genetic engineer in 6-12 months.   

Since I started partaking on this journey I've found that this space is still extremely complicated -- even for someone with extensive training.  Its crazy how much of the practice of molecular biology is not even minimally optimized for cost or time efficiency. I've been spending a lot of time and money trying to figure out the best way to approach a variety of topics and will contribute to the discussions here whenever I can.

-Will

[Tom Hodder]

On 14 February 2016 at 22:40, William Beeson <bees...@gmail.com> wrote:

Since I started partaking on this journey I've found that this space is still extremely complicated -- even for someone with extensive training.  Its crazy how much of the practice of molecular biology is not even minimally optimized for cost or time efficiency.

It could be worse, you could be in the UK! It seems to me that the US has a much better developed market for 2nd had equipment and a better range of suppliers for low cost consumables.

If it wasn't for ebay (and the generosity of donors of equipment), it would be very expensive due to poor service and prices given by the usual suspects supplying life science here :-(

 

[Jason Bobe]

Welcome Will! I wish there were a biotech academy when I was living in a corn field 1.5 hours southwest of Indianapolis :) 

I added your site to diybio.org/local

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[William Beeson]

Thanks Jason!  I think Indianapolis is a pretty good spot relative to other choices in the midwest because we have a decent sized biotech industry in town and a few good universities within ~1 hour of town.  Real estate is also very affordable.  The challenge is to build up the community here -- which I am working on.

[William Beeson]

Definitely true that we have a decent market for second hand equipment in the US.  However, I think the key to this movement getting real traction is if we can get a functional biotech lab to work with non-used, low-cost equipment.  The issue with second-hand equipment is that its not scalable and you are screwed if your "used" equipment breaks because the replacement may be much more expensive or hard to source.  I'm building the GLBA lab using only low-cost, new or easy to build equipment.  

[Tom Randall]

Will,

We may have similar interests. I have been involved with DIYbio before it was called that, with N. crassa in mind (same reasons, lots of postdoc experience). I transformed 74A with a plasmid containing the CAS9 gene with a trpC A. nidulans promoter/terminator in a first attempt to generate an N. crassa strain constitutively expressing CAS9 for CRISPR editing yesterday. Hopefully will get some transformants to work with.

www.roningenetics.org

We may have strains/plasmids that can be shared.

Tom

[William Beeson]

Very cool setup you have Tom!  I've been trying to get a transformation protocol for N.crassa to work that doesn't require an electroporator.  There's no low cost way to make an electroporator, but I may break down and just buy one because I know it works well.  I have the mus-51 strain (used for making clean knockouts) and FGSC2489.   Would like to obtain some of the classical morphological mutants for teaching purposes.

What are you using as a marker for testing CAS9? -- some good candidates would be the carotenoid pigmentation pathway genes.  If you think it works well it could be a very good teaching system (crosses where one parent has CAS9 and the other has the guide RNA).

-Will 

[Scott]

Wow, Will! ~4000 square feet. I am envious. Rent must be cheap there. Vancouver is so insane - Open Science Network is renting a tiny space from MakerLabs for the time being. All the best with your endeavour. 

Cheers,

Scott