Internship Petshop.bio physical microbes store

[Pieter]

This is a unique opportunity for a student that is interested in mixing biotech, creativity and retail skills! After running a number of successful concept pop-up stores at festivals and launching our online www.petshop.bio microbe store, we are now aiming to take the next step: opening up a microbe store in a busy shopping street in Amsterdam. 

Customers range from DIYBiologists, curious shopping addicts to bio artists and designers. When in need if pigment producing microbes for bio ink, glowing bacteria for living lamps, mycelium for a fungi sculpture or smart slime molds to play with they turn to Petshop. There is more in our incubators, fridge and freezer that can be added too.

With Petshop.bio we aim to bring microbiology closer to the public. And Amsterdam is the perfect place for that, with multiple creative biotech spaces like our Open Wetlab and the microbe zoo Micropia. The shop is highly experimental so lots of new things to try and be prepared for the unexpected.

People from 180 nationalities live in our city, so speaking Dutch is not a prerequisite. You will become part of the Open Wetlab team at Waag Society, the home of the Dutch DIYBio community.

For more information check out http://waag.org/nl/job/petshopbio-internship

[Nathan McCorkle]

This isn't about those "stuffed animal" microbe dolls, is it?

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-Nathan

[Nathan McCorkle]

Really, 30 monetary-units for some mycelium?
https://www.petshop.bio/products/mycelium

Why not go to the bulk food store and pay $0.05 USD for a chunk of
oyster mushroom?

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[Daniel C.]

In the 70s pet rocks were insanely popular. A few years ago all my co-workers paid 99 cents for an app that had NO functionality beyond sending the word "yo" to a friend. Don't underestimate the stupid crap people will pay money for, especially if it has shiny marketing surrounding it.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/CA%2B82U9Je3%2BohwN6DSJARk_HMsUScCULPB7sq82e2A6m6BQ%3DsTw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Cathal (Phone)]

Don't do that, please. People devaluing one another's work to the lowest-common-denominator is the kind of peer anti-support that keeps everyone labouring in obscurity.

Leaving asode the fact that a brick-and-mortar biohacking shop is costly (but it apparently exists!), there are significant advantages to buying a strain for the paltry cost of €30: strain identity can be known, sterility and purity guaranteed, and you're standardised with everyone else who bought that product and can avail of a community for support.

I recall getting this crap when I was planning to sell an open source plasmid *customised for DIYbio* for around €45: cheaper than pUC18 at most vendors, but I distinctly remembering someone accusing me of profiteering for not selling at $1. As if years of work designing and testing had nothing to do with making the thing and only the costs of fermentation mattered. I was even threatened that I'd be deliberately undercut and pushed out of business.

I hope Petshop.bio works out and I'm confident that the prices won't be the reason it doesn't. More likely the domain name will get seized by the organic association who own .bio. ;)

Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:43 PM, Cathal (Phone)
<cathal...@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
> Don't do that, please. People devaluing one another's work to the
> lowest-common-denominator is the kind of peer anti-support that keeps
> everyone labouring in obscurity.
>
> Leaving asode the fact that a brick-and-mortar biohacking shop is costly
> (but it apparently exists!), there are significant advantages to buying a
> strain for the paltry cost of €30: strain identity can be known, sterility
> and purity guaranteed, and you're standardised with everyone else who bought
> that product and can avail of a community for support.
>
> I recall getting this crap when I was planning to sell an open source
> plasmid *customised for DIYbio* for around €45: cheaper than pUC18 at most
> vendors, but I distinctly remembering someone accusing me of profiteering
> for not selling at $1. As if years of work designing and testing had nothing
> to do with making the thing and only the costs of fermentation mattered. I
> was even threatened that I'd be deliberately undercut and pushed out of
> business.

I recognize a significant difference between the IndieBB plasmid and
"mycelium". It does not have any strain listed, and if someone really
wants "mycelium" they can get it for 100X cheaper, from common sources
including most rotting lignocellulosic material (unlike custom
synthetic engineered DNA) or for a GRAS option, a grocery store. I
didn't criticize the labelled strains they had which were apparently
collected to achieve a wide-ranging color palette from a single
vendor.

[Cathal (Phone)]

Ok, fair points. I'd direct criticism at the root problem, in that case: if "mycelium" is too nonspecific then it needs to be more specific, rather than cheaper but still vague. :)

[BraveScience]

Not all people have the knowledge, time, equipment and skills to isolate mycelium through clonal reproduction.

Giving them the chance to receive and use ready-to-use material doesn't sound a crazy ripoff but a good opportunity to start correctly.

Moreover have you ever tried to isolate tissue from mushroom cap?
Much easier to have some already growing mothefucking thick piece of mycelium.

Cheers
Fede

[Pieter]

As you may have figured by the name of the shop and the product descriptions, the store is not really aiming at proficient microbiologists.

The hundreds of customers we had at our pop-up stores so far generally found it totally awesome to buy a microbe. Don't forget that most people have never seen something like that before.

We welcome all suggestions to make the store better, and more affordable. The best way to do it is to apply for the internship and help make it happen!

And don't worry, 30 euro might sound much, opening up a shop in the center of a popular shopping area of a capital city is expensive too. We will remain a non-profit organisation what ever happens anyway.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Apr 29, 2016 10:48 PM, "BraveScience" <braves...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Not all people have the knowledge, time, equipment and skills to isolate mycelium through clonal reproduction.

That is what the internet/books and friends/mentors at for.

> Giving them the chance to receive and use ready-to-use material doesn't sound a crazy ripoff but a good opportunity to start correctly.
>
> Moreover have you ever tried to isolate tissue from mushroom cap?

Yes, you pressure-cook some agar, get a few pressure-cooked knives/razors/scalpels, then wipe a mushroom with alcohol and maybe dip it in a bleach + sterile water solution, rinse well with sterile water, then shave layers off the mushroom, for each cut alcohol dipping and flame sterilizing the cutting tool. If it it really dirty, switch cutting tools. When you get a nice clean chunk exposed, place onto agar. Leave in kitchen cabinet for a few days and you will see mycelium, after a few months untouched it is not uncommon to get a small micro/mini mushroom.

> Much easier to have some already growing mothefucking thick piece of mycelium.

If you can't handle what I described above, there's probably not too much more someone would be able to do with a plate of mycelium, other than look at it die or possibly fruit. But I guess maybe there's a demand quickly available generic mycelium... I've never seen it sold like that before anywhere, so hard to imagine a use case.

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Hey Pieter - do you guys ship to the US? You have a few species that I don't think I have an affordable source for otherwise.

Thanks!

Patrik

PS: And yeah, you should really mention *which* mycelium you're selling on your website :-D

[Mega [Andreas Stuermer]]

"That is what the internet/books and friends/mentors at for." Not everyone's friends are in biotech or edven have a biotech mentor, especially in Europe. Infact, 50 km around me there has been dead silence for diybio. I just was very persistent and had the drive to learn everything by reading. Not everyone has.

Of course, one can inscribe to Uni and do molbio courses there. But just for isolating and growing mycelium?

[Mike Horwath]

Very nice concept, good luck!  I'm also curious if you will ship to US.

However a few words of caution...Aspergillus niger is potentially infectious, especially if inhaling a large # of spores or immunocompromised. Capturing "microbe pets" from the environment also has some risk if you happen to pick up something like B. anthracis or C. tetani. These kinds of risks are manageable with a little training, but not all customers are likely to have that...

Cheers,

Mike

[Daniel C.]

Could those risks be mitigated by including targeted antibiotics in the growth agar?

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[BraveScience]

The last concerns expressed make a lot of sense, maybe there's need for an illustrated guide for working with these organisms or setting up some lectures to spread the good practices to adopt in handling them.

Cheers,
Fede

[BraveScience]

@dan

Antibiotic might make it more tricky. People should be able to add them (but usually you need a prescription to posses antibiotic molecules) and resistance might be strain specific.

Isolating bacteria resistant to ampicillin or kanamycin is very easy.
In the lab I continuously have such issues, especially with low concentrations of ampicillin. Last time I found a nonGMO fluorescent bug, probably P.fluorescens growing on my plates.

Risk can be contained by just good practices and good working environments (that you need to have to avoid contaminations too).

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Yeah, isolating an unknown microbe is a Biosafety Level 2 activity. Unless you're really good at using sterile technique, the chances of isolating human pathogens from your own skin or breath are quite significant. You may be OK with having them in low abundance in your microbiome, but if you grow a whole plate full of it in pure culture, they could make you or your labmates very sick. Did you know that a surprisingly large number of healthy adults carry MRSA on their skin, for example?

Adding antibiotics is not really a solution - that'll just select for even nastier antibiotic resistant bacteria. You could use a broad-spectrum fungicide such as nystatin or natamycin if you specifically want to select bacteria instead of molds or yeasts.

You can try to bias which organisms to select for, by picking a suitable growth medium and growing conditions.Enterics such as E. coli, or skin bacteria such as S. aureus tend to like a saltier medium such as LB that matches the human body. So use a low-salt medium such as nutrient agar, and incubate at room temperature instead of body temperature. That's still not a guarantee that you won't select for any pathogens, but it should at least lower the odds.

Your best bet though, is to start from a source that you know is safe, such as food. Yoghurt, kombucha, sourdough starter, beer yeast, sauerkraut, cheese, probiotic supplements,... You'll still have to make sure you avoid any contamination, and you'll have to make sure to validate the identity of your isolate before getting too comfortable with it. But at least it'll be a damn lot safer than smearing some dog poop on an LB plate and incubating at 37C...

Patrik