Hey Y’all,
It’s been a while, but this seems to be Hive13 cromulent. P&G mason, cinci, st bernard, and west chester are getting rid of lots of industrial/research stuff. The auction starts tomorrow (7/25) and ends on thursday (7/26)
It Includes:
cameras (old digital/old analogue)
video cameras
balances
constant temperature baths
densitometers
incubators
switches/hubs
LN2 tanks
etc.
Good luck!
Wow, I'm only two pages into the listings and my mind is blown.
Thanks for sharing!
~Dave
Definitely looking at getting one or two of the items on here. Thanks for posting!!
Jon
I’m just trying to imagine how cool their labs are that they are dumping all this stuff…
Yeah, I’m going to pick up some of the equipment. It’ll be fun to do some of the DIY bio stuff, I’ve got some neat thoughts on protein synthesis that should be fairly straight forward to implement with a minimal amount of technology. Is anyone doing OSbio at the hackspace these days?
Not yet myself, unless you count yeast culture (beer brewing :D…) but I’d definitely be up for getting involved with an OSbio project! I’m an immunology graduate student so I do various bio techniques as my “day job.” What kind of protein synthesis project do you have in mind?
Mike
Mike,
It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years. It’s to cook up a plasmid based generalizable self stablizing protein expression system running on yogurt bacteria coculture. The idea is to exploit the native antibiotic peptides production that some strains of Lactobacillus produce as a selection factor maintaining the protein expression plasmid in a second strain. At the end ideally the system would end up as something that could be deployed easily to 3rd world people with a yogurt culturing knowledge base and some polypeptide medical need.
A first protein expression target could be Human intrinsic factor (HIF). The gut stops/slows producing it in many people around age 60 leading to b vitamin deficiencies that cause dementia/alzheimers like symptoms. In acute cases if it’s detected (a big if)the approach to treating it is to use animal sourced intrinsic factor. There is of course a pile of regulation/industrial capital required to allow that production. Sticking it in yogurt would be comparatively simple (if it works) and allow production anywhere there is milk and a warm clean pot.
Alternately we could muck around with some apple strain selection and make the hive1tree.
-AC
Enable 3rd world countries or build a Hive1tree. Damn it! Why must I choose! Lol
Hi Addison
First…what is a Hive1tree?
The lactobacillus protein expression system sounds like quite a project! Might be within reach though 
I’d be up for helping with it. At a minimum, you are probably going to want cell culture equipment, a PCR machine, and a method such as western blot to verify you have protein expression…any plans at this point? (one pitfall…do you know whether HIF folds correctly in bacteria?)
My goal for DIYbio (which I might or might not actually start) is adding transgenes to plants. Agrobacterium tumefaciens bacteria is specialized at incorporating some of its genes into the plant DNA so if you can get a transgene into the bacteria you can get it into a plant. I thought an interesting proof-of-concept would be to transfect some green fluorescent protein into plants to get them to glow under blacklight. Actually, this would probably use a lot of the same equipment as your yogurt project!
Mike
…And this whole conversation is why I love the hive.
yep!
Plants that glow under a black light! Awesome! I know what plat you should try first but you can only grow 4 at a time without it being a felony.
But in all seriousness, we should do these projects.
You’re definitely right about genetic engineering capability having a long development time. Getting sterility much less functional dna systems takes takes a lot of work. Some of the other dependencies for the Hive1tree package would probably be a -80 fridge (else, coderot), pippetters, an electroporation set up, centrifuge for dna purification, all the standard chemicals, and some set of enzymes with compliment vectors that will compile/run on bacteria and whatever the target organism is. It’s possible that classic plant breeding will be the easier route. Or induced mutation+selection. Either way, there is also a bunch of agriculture equipment for growing up variants that I have no clue about. (Arduino controlled irrigation and lighting systems? Fertilizer injectors?, ??)
That said :); “Hive1tree mk1” should be the apple; tasty, symbolic, with fairly good genetics/horticulture documentation. I think it would be neat to make a high contrast apple tree that was black/dark purple with a hexagonal (hive) bark shedding pattern that would bright white flowers in the spring. Plums might also be a good base as they are similarly known and but have more standard color options for the fruit.
As a place to start I’ve got my gpa’s old horticulture books and we do have the OSU extension agency that is probably pretty good size (it’s serving the 94 billion dollar ohio agriculture market).
There certainly is a lot of “wish list” equipment to make a functioning DIYbio lab! Here’s my thoughts:
Freezer–definitely need one, but may be able to cut corners here and just use a regular freezer. DNA is fortunately very stable for a biomolecule and will last years in a frozen pH-buffered solution. Main reason for -80 would be to preserve frozen cell cultures, and possibly some of the less stable enzymes/reagents.
Pipetters, centrifuge–yep! necessities.
electroporation setup–I bet we could make this with stuff already at the hive
enzymes and vectors–depends on the specific project, this stuff can get expensive fast! For genetic engineering a lactobacillus, for example, you’d probably be looking at buying a plasmid that “runs” in lactobacillus, the DNA sequence you want to add, a few different restriction enzymes and DNA ligase to splice it in, and the primers + nucleotides + transcriptase to amplify it by PCR…possibly other things i’m forgetting…
Growing a Hive1tree apple tree sounds fun. Do the traits you mentioned already exist in apples, so you could breed it in?
Induced mutation could be an interesting and relatively cheap way to go. Probably clone the plants rather than waiting for them to seed to speed it up. Here’s a nice blog about DIY plant cloning and tissue culture: http://cloningforthecommonman.blogspot.com/
Cheers
Mike
Am I remembering correctly that nearly all apple trees which produce sweet apples are clones, and specifically NOT grown from seed?
If this ends up being something actively pursued, I have friends at a research maintenance department, and may be able to get somebodies throw away -80 freezer. Keep the mailing list updated!
Have you guys/gals seen the newest issue of Make Magazine? There’s a whole segment about DIY lab equipment, including the Dremelfuge. There’s also a battery powered Stir Plate that I looked into making for creating yeast starters for homebrewing, but I found the directions lacking and couldn’t follow the schematic enough to reproduce it.
Ian