The price of DNA sequencing your genome has dropped 99.999999% since 2003. For those of you discussing the “falling price of DNA sequencing”, it’s time to stop. Sure, it’s fun to think about a future when sequencing genomes will be so much cheaper. But we’re here. Today, you can sequence your genome for $3,000. This isn’t even news, those prices were announced 3 months ago and no one got out their party hats.  I’ve even heard the Beijing Genomics Institute offers $800 genomes when you buy 10 genomes at once. Now what do we do with it? MORE…

BioCurious has amazing friends. We bought a surplus Illumina Genome Analyzer DNA sequencer. For $1.

This Illumina Genome Analyzer (GA) DNA sequencer is from 2008 and originally sold for $500,000. Because of the dropping cost of DNA sequencing, it would be more costly for BioCurious to use this older sequencer than to just using a DNA sequencing service. We were lucky enough to have some friends at Illumina who sold us the sequencer cheap. We decided the best use would be to take it apart to see how it works. Derek Jacoby and Raymond McCauley taught us how “Next Generation” DNA sequencing works and we spent Sunday taking the sequencer apart. MORE…

Any instructions with a picture titled “Amount of material needed for fecal sample” have to be either mundane or awesome. In this case it’s totally awesome. These instructions are for the American Gut microbiome project that arrived in the mail last week. They demand to sequence the DNA of bacteria in my guts.

Your body is said to have its own micro biome of many different types of bacteria living in and on you. You probably did a report on your favorite “biome” as a 5th grade science project. Your favorite was probably “Tundra”, “Desert”, or “Marine” because those are awesome and probably no one in your class reported on “Grasslands”. On Earth, a “biome” is a classification of an area based on what’s living there. Biomes are distinct habitats. “Micro biome” is a new term that’s meant to define all the microbes in an area of your body.

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Biomedical engineering is the most valuable college major. Getting high school students excited about biotech is a nightmare because it takes a ton of energy and time. Where’s the happy medium?

This is a rough guide of how to set up a high school classroom DNA lab. I’ve done a lot of work to make the process more simple for students and hobbyists and learned some tricks along the way. I hope these will save you hours of stress setting up your lab and keeping it running. Plus, I can rattle off all these steps as good as this guy rapping about 200 decimals of pi so I figured it would be best to write them down. MORE…