What to do..?

[Adi Ajit]

Hey guys, I've been doing some cursory reading on Synbio along with some basic Bio for university, and want to make the leap into DIYBio, perhaps even building my lab. There's a tremendous amount of reading that can be done on the subject, but it has left me feeling slightly confused and overwhelmed, so I was hoping maybe some community members could direct me in the right direction. 

Right now as a college student both money and space are concerns of mine, so I think virtual labs would be a good place to start. What kind of software should I be looking at, and what kind of experiments should I be thinking about replicating.

If I want to start building/acquiring equipment what are some of the cheapest ways I can get the most utility out of a DIY lab. It'd be nice if I could work with plasmids, and run a PCR, but if thats a bit out of my price range I'd certainly be open to hearing cheap actions I can take.

In the long term (maybe 1-2 years), I want to try and get an iGem group going at my school. There isn't one at the moment, but my cohorts in the Bio dept. seem pretty amenable to the idea. I would try to start one myself, but right now I feel that I lack the scope of understanding to assess what kind of money and commitment I would need to get a group going, maybe you guys can inform me.

[Koeng]

Where are you right now? There might be a DIYbio hackerspace around where you are. If not, I'd just start out by buying a little cheap transformation kit from Carolina. For around a 100 bucks, you can transform a plasmid. If you wanted to do PCR, just get a cheap PCR machine off of ebay (GET ONE WITH A HEATED LID, BELIEVE ME) and some mastermix such as from the guys at http://www.openbiotech.com/ . They got 100rxns worth for about 40$.

For equipment I almost exclusively recommend eBay, except for http://genefoo.com/products/pipettes these guys pipettes. If you would like to do some gel electrophoresis, Avery (who is frequently here) has created a little DIY gel system with a transluminator (I believe) for 150 bucks. I woulda got it if I didn't already have a gel electrophoresis box, powersupply, and transluminator. As centrifuges go, you can 3d print the "Dremelfuge" or buy a cheap one off ebay (what I did)

Plasmids and PCR should be easy to do, here is Cathal's protocols- https://github.com/cathalgarvey/biohacking-protocols . They are really good, pretty much you can get started without any of the above.

If you really wanna get into this, know that universities will often sponsor these projects (which is good, they take intellectual property but give you a TON of stuff).

-Koeng

(Oh and a side note. If you wanna do PCR get primers from invitrogen, you can get 40bp primers for 5 bucks using their value oligos, and over 25 they give it to you for 3.75 each. sorry for advertising )