Re: [DIYbio] Re: DIYbio projects

Why not make a business out of it?

A Kickstarter project, and pricing that can support a full-time person to do

the work, including the quality control.

Sell kits to schools, etc.

If you made a lot of blotted paper, then presumably the QC could be distributed

over the whole lot -- test one out of 1,000 postcards, and offer a guarantee --

money back or a new postcard.

An automated web store with outsourced fulfillment leaves the person running it

with lots of time for preparing the parts, writing up web pages that describe how

to use them, and marketing. But if fulfillment is just printing out a label and

sticking it on an envelope from a postage meter, in-house fulfillment is pretty

easy.

Offer to make up special (non-top-48) bricks for a reasonably stiff price, and then

make a few thousand postcards and add them to the catalog.

And if BioCurious wanted to teach classes in how to prepare the parts, and part of

the class was QC and blotting 1,000 postcards, then they could turn that into a

profit center. Charge for the class, and keep a cup of the QC'd part for blotting.

Win twice.

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On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Mackenzie Cowell <mac@diybio.org> wrote:

Getting 1400 "standardized" biobrick parts is a neat experience, but as others have noted, many do not work or are poorly documented.  It would be great if a team put together an unofficial mini-distribution of the top 48 standard genetic parts: the best of the best.  The ones that are the most commonly used, have the best documentation, and together can be used to create a variety of different systems.

For instance, a library of control elements (promoters, rbs, terminators) with some dynamic range, a plasmid library, some reporter genes, a couple of different biosensors.

Let's start the top-48 list.  What parts would you love to have today that are also well documented and have been show to work?

I think my all-time favorite part is... bba_r0040.

Mac

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Cory Tobin <cory.tobin@gmail.com> wrote:

> I had a disturbing conversation with Randy Rettberg last year at iGEM where
> he practically put his fingers in his ears and said "La La I can't hear you"
> when I asked if Genspace could contribute parts to the BioBricks library.
> Apparently anyone connected with DIYbio is taboo, at least on paper.

It's funny/sad because on their website they extol concepts like
"sharing" and "freedom" but when confronted about their lack of
sharing they give everyone the silent treatment.

> But they would probably flip out if we were to officially share them with
> everyone. This needs to be addressed and rectified, hopefully when the
> library changes hands.

From what I understand the Foundation has no plans to freely
distribute/sell their distributions to anyone outside the official
iGEM teams or university labs any time soon.  The only way DIY people
will be able to get parts is through some unofficial distribution
method.

A couple years ago a few friends and I hashed out a plan to replicate
the iGEM distribution that year.  It turned out to be a lot more
tedious and monotonous labor than we had hoped.  Transforming and
minipreping in bulk was actually a breeze. The difficult part was the
quality control, which was basically a lot of restriction digests.  I
could never come up with a method for rapidly checking the correctness
of the plasmids in parallel.

One could imagine a system where individuals who happen to get their
hands on some parts do quick minipreps in bulk, blot the liquid on
paper and distribute the paper to the recipients with no guarantee
that the parts are correct.  The quality control would then be in the
hands of the recipients.  It's not the ideal situation but for now
it's probably the only way for outsiders to get parts without any one
person dedicating their life to replicating the parts.


-cory

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