Here’s a song I wrote recently, finished it up while I was in Hawaii
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One Night – Tito Jankowski
Go Mac, Meredith, and DIYbio!
Love the name.
Predisposition: Loves Uma Thurman
Could not help but post this “related” screenshot from Navigenic’s personal genome analysis:
A traditional biology research requires a team of a dozen people and a few million dollars. There are new tools that make some types of research very easy for an individual.
For instance, measuring dna. This experiment traditionally requires a lab and equipment. It has now become a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ experiment which you can do with materials found in your grocery store.
What would you do if you could measure dna?
“The United States should be less concerned that terrorists will
become biologists and far more concerned that biologists will become
terrorists,” the report states.
A story courtesy of our friends at the Associated Press:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081202/ap_on_go_ot/wmd_study_11
This story serves as more evidence of why discussing DIYbio with the
public is such a critical issue. We’re doing good so far – we’ve
explained DIYbio to eachother, even though many of us are computer
scientists, engineers, and beer brewers.
As interest in DIYbio grows, our work with friends, students, parents,
and government officials becomes increasingly important. Through open
discussion with the public community, we will discover greater
applications and uses for our work, and the public will enjoy a
greater understanding of the language of life.
I challenge us all today to make an attempt at explaining DIYbio, or a
DIYbio project, to someone with no biology background. I spoke with my
friend Rob, a glass sculptor, about bioWeatherMaps on Sunday – and got
some great ideas considering he has little experience in biology.
People touch crosswalks.
But how will those species compare if we sample one button in San Francisco, CA and one in Boston, MA?
Ingredients:
Sterile swab
Plastic tube
Detergent
Instructions:
Dip the swab in the detergent. Wipe the swab on a crosswalk button, picking up lots of bacteria. Put it in the tube.
The detergent explodes the cells, and their DNA is released. So, now we have millions of genomes floating around, likely from dozens of different species.
Now, it would be nice if we could just sequence this as is.
Any we can. Kind of. Current computational tools can be used to sequence dozens of different species in the same mixture, as was shown when Craig Venter sequenced the ocean. So, we don’t need to separate the DNA into different species first. Great!
But we’ll need pure DNA first. That involves purifying the solution, removing the detergent, and possibly amplifying (making lots of copies) of our DNA so that we have enough to put in a Sequencer.
Ok, done. The bill is $15,000.
There’s a catch. 454, a Sequencing company, charges $15,000 to sequence 300 samples at once. We only sequenced 1 sample, but paid for 300. (Actually, this doesn’t make sense, will clarify later 11/30/08)
So let’s take a few more samples and get our friends in other cities involved. Get 300 different crosswalk samples, and now we’re talking about $50 instead ($15k/300).
That’s doable. That’s all courtesy of the mind of Jason Bobe.
Now what do you do with all the data? Is there something you’d rather sequence than crosswalks? Something that would be useful to compare with 299 other samples? This is what I’m interested in. Crosswalks were chosen because they’re easy, public, and have a distinct, mappable location.
Think on these things.
![bluehash has added a photo to the pool:www.machinegrid.com/2009/12/the-jerker-geek-desk-workbench/I spend alot of time in this space. The setup uses two Ikea Jerker desks - combined. I just swing between them depending on what I'm working on. The setup was gradually built up over a year and a half. I spend time editing my pics[D40/18-55/50/55-200] / playing TF2 or working on an embedded project.IKEA should get back the Jerker desk. Both the desks were got off Craigslist. If there is more interest, I'll label all the stuff on the electronics bench with purchase links in a separate pic.If you need to know anything specific, please ask it in the comments, I'll answer or leave a comment on my homepage(link above).](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2742/4196587122_28abab81df_t.jpg "bluehash has added a photo to the pool:www.machinegrid.com/2009/12/the-jerker-geek-desk-workbench/I spend alot of time in this space. The setup uses two Ikea Jerker desks - combined. I just swing between them depending on what I'm working on. The setup was gradually built up over a year and a half. I spend time editing my pics[D40/18-55/50/55-200] / playing TF2 or working on an embedded project.IKEA should get back the Jerker desk. Both the desks were got off Craigslist. If there is more interest, I'll label all the stuff on the electronics bench with purchase links in a separate pic.If you need to know anything specific, please ask it in the comments, I'll answer or leave a comment on my homepage(link above).")
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