Re: [DIYbio] Re: Ultra-Cheap DNA Printing/Sequencing

On Feb 25, 2014 8:14 AM, "SC" <stacy734@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm literally saying I want to do this to pay off my school loans
>  
> I have huge respect for anyone who starts a business to pay off school loans.  As a practical matter, I'm not sure this is the way to go. People that need synthetic DNA made for them typically don't have the resources to test it themselves, so you would have to do QA

The proof is in the pudding, though, if I sent Cathal/mega/Sebastian a vial of liquid... Any of them would quickly be able to if it coded for whatever they wanted. They'd be doing characterization on the DNA from their colonies anyway... PCR, restriction digests, and western blots are very common tools in any experiment trying to prove they cloned something or prove that something is expressed. Thesr are standard molbio tools, nothing new, nothing a decent cloning lab won't have. The only thing uncommon in diybio is the western blots, but that's why you just rely on a complex reporter system to act like a 'physical hash' of the DNA. If it smells like bananas and fluoresces, the DNA was good. Determining percent correct strands would be a bit more challenging, but again nothing a lab in any large city doesn't already perform everday (cytometry). Cytometry is pretty cheap sample wise, and most hospitals have a lab.

before shipping product.   More to the point, you would have to convince customers you could do QA properly and were reliable. Your end product is someone else's starting component for a more complex process, and if it's contaminated with incomplete strands (for example), your customers will waste time and resources and won't be happy.
>  
> As synthetic DNA isn't that expensive to buy from well established labs, I'm not sure that

Really? You're joking right? I'm talking about orders of magnitude cheaper than current markets, my initial goal is 100x cheaper, but my rough calculations for downscaling the reaction even further (and still keeping overall reaction yield low) show 10^12 cost reduction with a 1micron cube reaction center. <=$1000 genome

type of home business would be able to compete effectively in the current marketplace.   As a consumer of such things, I'd probably go with a better known supplier that came with recommendations from my colleagues rather than save a little money dealing with a home lab.   I don't mean to discourage you, so please just consider this a bit of marketing information from your target group.

No it's good to hear that when I get it right people's minds will be blown.

>  
> However, if you're doing this for the spirit of invention and don't need to generate an income form it right away, I wish you the best of luck.

Thanks, I was lucky to start studying on this my first year of college, and its been my goal since then. That was 2008, and I feel much more confident these days. Lots of engineering tricks have been accumulating in that time, lots of business networking, lots and lots of research and mostly instrumentation development.

Luckily I made friends with a guy who has a FIB and underused microfab capable wet lab... So things are almost in place for me to make so leaping progress in the coming months.

>
> --
> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
> Learn more at www.diybio.org
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/546ab571-ca11-4a6e-9642-5cd477633a81%40googlegroups.com.
>
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.