[DIYbio] Re: DIY DNA synthesis (more)

Hey all,

I sent an email to a friendly polymer-advocate and figure it should
also be archived here for prosperity's sake. I'm glad someone liked
the idea of do-it-yourself DNA synthesis. Here's the (unedited)
email--

Hey David,

So I was up this morning again doing some reading on ways that we
could do DIY DNA synthesis. I've produced a bibliography of
interesting papers relevant to the idea. For some reason when I first
came across DNA synthesis, I assumed it was only solid-phase, but I'm
glad to find out that there are photolabile-group-deprotection (etc.)
methods that make it possible to synthesize genomes via
photolithography.

BibTeX bibliography:
http://heybryan.org/books/papers/bibliographies/DIY-DNA-synth.bib

Now, a friend of mine- the one on campus here building a reprap-
suggested using LCDs as a reprogrammable photomask. There are many
papers that have talked about doing this, and a few that actually
demonstrate it. The oldest papers go back into the late 1980s where
they were talking about electro-optical adaptive phase masks and such.
Anyway. That's pretty neat, but it requires this terribly large lense
to make it work.

But .. in my literature search .. I once found a paper describing
micromolding in microchannels via capillary force. In other words, the
polymers literally crawl up the channels and then cure. There has even
been a paper on doing this for making microemitters (organic/polymer
LEDs). But the problem with this method is that it requires 10^-6 torr
for the vacuum deposition process of the metal electrode or something.
Yikes. [[as it turns out, Hong H Lee and friends have a cathode
contact metal transfer method that can be used here, but it seems to
also require gnarly chemicals]]

Other papers talk about using ink-jet printers to print out OLEDs,
which is fine, but they still sometimes require those metal contacts.
Maybe there's a way around this? What I would like to be able to do is
print out a PCB pattern from my printer and use an ink-jet compatible
polymer to draw the LEDs. And then have a matrix-addressable-array of
my tiny microemitters (they don't have to be *too* tiny, and they
don't have to last forever)- so that I could rapidly switch the
electronics on/off so that I can activate light in different regions,
or ideally control each LED individually all at once. Anyway, that's
just basic electronics.

Maybe you have some ideas or general directions in which to point me?
An electrodeless light-emitting diode may *sound* impossible or crazy,
or mad and crazy, but that's what I'm here for :-).

Ink-jet-printablephosphorescent organic light-emitting-diode devices
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JSIDE8000016000012001229000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

I don't have access to that paper. Are you able to get it?

So, if there's a way to do LCD-based synthesis without the lense, that
would be ideal. But alternatively, printing out an array of LEDs isn't
entirely terrible, as long as the color "just so happens to be" the
right wavelength for the photocurible DNA synthesis steps. Blah. This
is getting complicated.

But other than that, things sound like they are about to get
interesting, especially if you're able to "print out" genomes from an
inkjet printer (more or less).

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507