200$ Real-Time PCR Thermocycler

[Gabriele Borelli]

Dear DIYbio users,

my name is Gabriele Borelli, I am a 25 years old passionate and crazy electronic engineer.

I am developing an easy-to-use real-time PCR thermocycler with four collegues.

Now that we have our first product, we would like to ask feedback to the greatest biohackers community in the world.

Here some features of the thermocycler:

- Easy-to-use and controllable through and App for smartphone and tablet.

- Real-time detection on your samples.

- 96 well.

- Not quantitatively accurate as the top-notch Roche thermocycler, but more than enough precise to reliably discriminate between "DNA has been amplified" and "DNA has NOT been amplified"

- SYBR green is not necessary.

- Price: 200$ App included.

Would you buy a thermocycler with the previous features?

We want to bring to everybody who has interest and passion in studying biology the instruments to do that. 

We had this chance in electronics, why should not Biohackers have it?

Thanks you in advance for sharing your opinion, it has a high value!

Ciao,

Gabriele.

[Marc Juul]

Will it be fully open hardware / open source?

If yes, then I'd buy one.

If not, then no, I can get something like this from a local biotech auction site for a similar price.

--

marc/juul

[Winnie Poncelet]

Same as Marc!

[ukitel]

Hi Gabriele,

Sounds interesting... but what about the sensibility?
If you're doing a real-time PCR, you'd like not just to see amplified yes/no, but also (at least) to get a relative estimate of how much template was in there.

Also, open source/hardware?

Best,

Marco

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Gabriele Borelli <borel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> - Not quantitatively accurate as the top-notch Roche thermocycler, but more
> than enough precise to reliably discriminate between "DNA has been
> amplified" and "DNA has NOT been amplified"

This will scare off the more professional/power users... experiments
are hard and expensive and maybe use rare DNA, these folks don't want
to waste their time, effort, and precious samples if the hardware has
not rigourously been tested, calibrated, normalized, etc. You'll need
to do environmental stress testing (test in hot environment, cold
environment, for long periods of time in both... and prove that in all
cases, your performance quality remains high and consistent). Quality
Control is king.

> - SYBR green is not necessary.

Why isn't it needed? Do you use UV detection? If so, what dosage over
the whole run (I guess watt-hours, or something with lux, etc)... this
could have implications on the fidelity of the DNA (UV breaks bonds).

[Gabriele Borelli]

Thank you for sharing your opinions.

@ Marc and Winnie: YES, our aim is to make it open-source. This is the only way to make science available to who has passion.

@ Marco and Nathan: it depends. There are several applications in which you just want to know whether there is presence of what you are looking for. 

In that case, if you could also avoid electrophoresys, it would save your time and your resources. 

Moreover, we are validating an alternative detection method that does not require fluorescent molecules nor UV.

About that, I keep the secret just because we want to be 99% sure of the effectiveness in the first place.

Full speed ahead!

[BioBot]

hi Gabriele,

I think as a "Go-no-Go" would be useful and for that price - awesome.

Sign me on.

Chiu

[Tobias Viehböck]

Definitely sounds interesting. I am doing RNASeq and checking via qPCR if DNAse digestion of genomic DNA was successful, so it is kust presence/absence of a molecule. I am a little bit concerned about sensitivity though