Re: [DIYbio] Current state of smallest genome aka minimal cell?

The OpenTrons can do protein purification using magbeads with their magdeck. Currently for the OT, I believe there is some work on having the magnets next to the pipette tips, so you can wash the material in the tip and get a much higher protein purification yield. Protein purification with a magdeck is great for getting a lot of small things (96 well purification is totally possible), but per yield protein, it's about 100x less cost effective than column based. What makes sense is first purifying protein with a magdeck on the opentrons to quickly test the protein, and once you are happy with the results, move it to a larger purification system that uses columns. 

OpenTrons can also do columns if you're a wizard and hack the OT1 properly, but since that version is getting less and less support, I think OT2 is the way to go for small-volume purification, and then subsequently scaling up with an idiosyncratic pump-system. 

It'd be great if there was a nice high-throughput protein purification machine, but I don't think there is. 

The other option is getting the bead prices down to match columns, but good luck with that. 

Koeng

On Sunday, April 29, 2018 at 10:41:13 AM UTC-7, John Griessen wrote:

On 04/28/2018 11:38 PM, Koeng wrote:
> Soooo right now at the BioBricks FreeGenes Project (I help lead that effort, having marketed it much yet because I'm still scaling our robots, submission->shipping, etc) we are synthesizing every single gene from Mycoplasma JCVI syn3.0, genitalium, and pneumoniae, plus all the genes from Mesoplasma florum (also the essential gene sets from Bacillus subtilis and E. coli) all codon optimized for E. coli expression (MoClo compatible). We already have the gene cloning down, so it should take us about 2 weeks to clone those 3mbps, but in the future the aim is to get protein purification automated with the opentrons so we can begin discovering all the functions and combinations of all those genes.

Please tell us more about protein purification with the opentrons.