DIYBIO.to has educational, community and member projects:
Educational Projects:
We have a project with experiment.com where we reach out to teach give practical wet lab instruction in PCR. We will be posting the sites and times for our free or almost free courses in the coming weeks. The information about our course can be found here: Demystifying-PCR-fostering-scientific-literacy-through-hands-on-PCR-education
Another current community project is species typing in commercial meat. DNA is extracted from the meat sample and species-specific primers are used to amplify DNA in the sample via the polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR). Using PCR we can identify the species of DNA present in the meat. We have primers that detect beef, pork, lamb, horse and chicken DNA. We are also interested in looking at Fish species, as different fish have been reported to be mixed during processing, especially in fish products like fish sticks and fake crab.
We also perform agar art at the Hacklab.to open house nights, and demonstrate this fun project so that others can get a sense of the wide variety of colours available to biology techniques and also have some fun! Microscopy and other demos are also performed for these nights.
Community Projects:
Beer and Cider projects – fluorescent green beer and microbiome of cider:
Fluorescent green beer is the goal and we are still aiming for some success by St. Patrick’s day 2025! We have a GFP in our yeast strains, but we want to stably overexpress it using a construct with an appropriate signal peptide to actually secrete the GFP without antibiotics. However, we also did a little digging and found that GFP needs oxygen and neutral pH to fluoresce. The oxygen part can be addressed by adding air using a bubbler, or just shaking the beer while pouring it out! But the pH requires a pH stable form of GFP, which we hope to obtain or clone! Fun project but in the end the construct might also have truly useful purposes as well! To move this project forward, we are also testing out our newly donated minigel apparati. Using the protein gels, can test the level of our GPF overexpression in the media or beer, and then use the plate read function of our realtime PCR machine for testing GFP levels.
We are also looking at the microbiome of cider, under different conditions. Some of our members make cider from crabapples with wild yeast fermentation, and sometimes it tastes really good, other times just ok. So the question is how the microbiome differs, and what can we do to make the taste good all the time? We have extracted the DNA, and started PCR of regions to identify the microbiome. NOTE: we are not making beer or cider on the premises, nor are we selling it.
Member Projects:
Members of DIYBIO.to who are members of hacklab.to are welcome to conduct their own experiments in our community lab space. There are several groups working on their own startups, which we cannot describe here.
One group is interested in working with microfluidics to develop methods of detecting proteins. This involves creating the clones to be expressed in E.coli, and testing whether the commercial antibodies to these proteins work well for the testing, then developing the assay.
We also have bioinformatic projects in our Meetup group looking for methods of examining changes in networks over time on Cytoscape. We are also interested in learning more about cutting-edge genomics methods, such as spatial genomics methods of analysis. We currently have a member who is conducting experiments so cutting-edge he sometimes falls of the cliff of knowledge.