Re: [DIYbio] Re: qPCR fluorescence detection dynamic range

Yes I suppose "low cost" was too vague. I'm sorry that I haven't properly described this yet and will work on a more complete blog post shortly. My main goal is to bring what I think is a very powerful technique to a lot more people than are currently using it. Obstacles to doing that include hardware costs, reagent costs, and knowing what to do and how to do it for your application, and even developing new applications. I think that the touch screen is valuable for enabling proper use of the device/reaction setup in some use cases, and being a device which generates data, internet and web connectivity via ethernet/wifi are paramount to A) providing a great user experience for researchers to access and analyze their data, and B) enable others to build applications on top of the machine. By "low cost" hardware, I meant it would be cheaper than the cheapest generally available qPCR machine (which AFAIK is about $10k) by at least an order of magnitude, not that it would be the absolute cheapest machine possible.

Josiah earlier talked about one very important application of measuring gene expression. This is probably the biggest use of qPCR today and what originally got me into it (I wanted to "debug" biological systems I had built, and gene expression, while in no means adequate by itself, is one of the easiest and most effective tools). To the extent people have difficulty getting this to work, that is an opportunity for DIYbio to innovate. I am excited about this machine especially in a DIYbio context because unlike the earlier OpenPCR machine, this machine produces data, and there is a lot of things people on this mailing list can do with data once it is exposed in an open platform.

But there are applications well beyond that. Health apps are obvious: qPCR is the gold standard in viral diagnostics and quantifying viral load. But also say you want to know if there is horse meat in your food, or dolphin meat, or listeria, or E.Coli O157:H7? Again qPCR is the gold standard.

But I'm even interested in the most mundane uses. Say you have ran a PCR reaction, and now want to send it off for sequencing to do DNA barcoding. Or you PCRed something to clone. But you don't know if the PCR worked. Why should you spend time and money sending it off to sequence speculatively, only to find out days later that it didn't? Or why should you spend time and money casting and running a gel? If your PCR machine can show you the amplification curve and melting curve analysis right after the run, then you will immediately know if it worked. We need smarter machines like this and many others at every step of the way to make biology engineerable, because right now the whole process takes too damn long.

-Josh