Perhaps it's time that we at DIYBio came up with our own means of DNA printing and sequencing. It may be rough and inaccurate at first, but I'm certain that the project will take off within a year or so, and eventually become industry-standard. It would be like the GNU/Linux of synthetic biology. ;)As a seed idea, we could use carbon nanotubes created using vapor deposition around nickle nanoparticles of around 12 nm in diameter. Then, in an argon atmosphere, the nanotubes would be doped with gold atoms on one side. DNA would be pulled through a stack of these nanotubes as in electrophoresis (from a positive charge to a negative one of the other side of the chamber) and surface interactions with the DNA bases could be monitored through the gold nanoparticles. It wouldn't be easy to pull off, but one divide could shotgun sequence DNA incredibly quickly with a high degree of accuracy. As for printing, DNA would be produced conventionally, but this time with a small laser at the end of the carbon nanotubes. If the DNA currently running through any given carbon nanotube did not match the desired strand, the laser at the end would activate, destroying the strand.
So basically, yes. :)
Again, virtually no one can make their own CPUs yet the modern computer is essentially the foundation of our civilization at this point
On Feb 25, 2014 8:14 AM, "SC" <stac...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm literally saying I want to do this to pay off my school loans
>
> I have huge respect for anyone who starts a business to pay off school loans. As a practical matter, I'm not sure this is the way to go. People that need synthetic DNA made for them typically don't have the resources to test it themselves, so you would have to do QA
The proof is in the pudding, though, if I sent Cathal/mega/Sebastian a vial of liquid... Any of them would quickly be able to if it coded for whatever they wanted. They'd be doing characterization on the DNA from their colonies anyway... PCR, restriction digests, and western blots are very common tools in any experiment trying to prove they cloned something or prove that something is expressed. Thesr are standard molbio tools, nothing new, nothing a decent cloning lab won't have. The only thing uncommon in diybio is the western blots, but that's why you just rely on a complex reporter system to act like a 'physical hash' of the DNA. If it smells like bananas and fluoresces, the DNA was good. Determining percent correct strands would be a bit more challenging, but again nothing a lab in any large city doesn't already perform everday (cytometry). Cytometry is pretty cheap sample wise, and most hospitals have a lab.
before shipping product. More to the point, you would have to convince customers you could do QA properly and were reliable. Your end product is someone else's starting component for a more complex process, and if it's contaminated with incomplete strands (for example), your customers will waste time and resources and won't be happy.
>
> As synthetic DNA isn't that expensive to buy from well established labs, I'm not sure that
Really? You're joking right? I'm talking about orders of magnitude cheaper than current markets, my initial goal is 100x cheaper, but my rough calculations for downscaling the reaction even further (and still keeping overall reaction yield low) show 10^12 cost reduction with a 1micron cube reaction center. <=$1000 genome
type of home business would be able to compete effectively in the current marketplace. As a consumer of such things, I'd probably go with a better known supplier that came with recommendations from my colleagues rather than save a little money dealing with a home lab. I don't mean to discourage you, so please just consider this a bit of marketing information from your target group.
No it's good to hear that when I get it right people's minds will be blown.
>
> However, if you're doing this for the spirit of invention and don't need to generate an income form it right away, I wish you the best of luck.
Thanks, I was lucky to start studying on this my first year of college, and its been my goal since then. That was 2008, and I feel much more confident these days. Lots of engineering tricks have been accumulating in that time, lots of business networking, lots and lots of research and mostly instrumentation development.
Luckily I made friends with a guy who has a FIB and underused microfab capable wet lab... So things are almost in place for me to make so leaping progress in the coming months.
>
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Oh and also I likely wouldn't start distributing raw DNA, it would likely be in a phage or episomal vector, maybe a BAC... Mailing stab cultures or lyophilized/dried culture.
If you could ship DNA at 1/100 the costs I pay, I wouldn't care if it
had a 1/1000 error rate. That'd probably be my threshold for
correctional PCR, but at 1/100 the cost I could easily afford sequencing
and a few primers to amend errors.
For me, DNA synth costs are a huge, huge factor in my ability to work,
so that'd be a huge change.
-L
Sorry I missed your message Stacy, yeah I've priced reagents from Glen Research, it comes to just under $1000, not including an argon tank, misc solvents, enzymes, cleanup kits, pipettors, scales, pumps, UV/vis spectrometer, etc...
Curiously, have you priced out the materials? Not the materials to make the device, but the materials to run it, the enzymes and nucleotides?
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