Cool! 20 years ago, I tried using PCR quantitatively to study estrogen receptor gene expression in feline uterine epithelial cells for my senior thesis. I didn't end up doing much science though, because I spent too much time hung up on techniques.
OpenPCR - open source biotech on your desktop
21–22 of 22 posts
Re: OpenPCR - open source biotech on your desktop
#22I am completely behind the spirit of this idea, but I wish they would openly address the cost of running PCR reactions which take enzymes, nucleotides, specific phosphate buffers in or to complete. All of these things cost as do the methods to analyze your final PCR products. I assume this is all covered under their mentioning 'kits', but these accessory components can rapidly become more expensive than the instrumen…
This is Josh - one of the people behind the OpenPCR project. I agree with you that reagents can be a huge amount of the cost. Part of this depends on the quantity of reactions you're doing. Taking the DNA barcoding of trees example we gave, if you're doing hundreds of reactions the cost can already be quite low as crocowhile pointed out. If you're just learning or doing a few reactions, here's where a kit containing…
Going back to the barcoding of trees, how would you do it? I assume you'd use some sort of SNP identification or specific DNA primers, but then you've just got a bunch of DNA in a tube.
The typical way of visualizing DNA is using an electrophoresis gel - most of the components are cheap/easy to obtain (agarose, electrodes, power supply, buffer), but how would you visualize your gel? Typical ethidium bromide stains are probably out of the question, given that ethidium bromide is so carcinogenic - most people probably don't have access to ethidium bromide. Maybe use a safer stain? (googling seems to point to invitrogen's SYBR Safe DNA stain as a possibility).
Then again, you could just use a UV spec to measure concentration, but how many people have a UV spec?
Looking forward to your results! In the future I think it would be nice to have open source enzyme starters (kind of like brewers/bakers yeast starter kits?) so that people could just grow+purify their own enzymes. (after the open source centrifuge that is =P )