Do-it-yourself biology at Biocurious. Photo credit: Maria Chavez.

Let’s say you want to do a little “do-it-yourself” biological tinkering. Maybe you have an idea to make bacteria that can sense or even break down mercury in the environment. Or you want to attract funding for your start up with a few choice experiments. Or you just always wanted to do some biology. Where can you turn?

For people like me, it’s easy. I work for Stanford’s Department of Genetics and so if I were so inclined, I’d have access to the labs there. But this obviously isn’t a typical situation.

For everyone else (at least here in the Bay Area), there is an organization called Biocurious. They are an open lab located in Sunnyvale where you can go and do some biology experiments.

For a monthly fee (currently around $100/month for a year subscription) they provide the equipment, a lab bench and office space. You also get free classes from experts to help you get started.

This lab space is great for folks with some previous lab experience and/or who have an idea of their own they’d like to get started on. The equipment is all there for them to get started and they even get 15% discounts on any reagents they need. Stuff like restriction enzymes, Taq polymerase, nucleotides, etc.

But at least for right now, the space/concept isn’t as useful for the uninitiated. If you just want to come and play, it can be hard to know what to do. Sort of like wanting to design a mobile app but having no experience and having never used one!

One thought I had was maybe membership can come with an optional, relatively simple project that can be done to get the member’s feet wet. Maybe using the mixable and matchable bits of DNA from BioBricks to create a unique, artificial gene. That way the member could create something new but not have it be some cookbook, high school experiment.

This was just one idea off the top of my head. The folks at Biocurious know this is a problem and are brainstorming solutions. Can you think of ways that might help a newbie get started? What would it take to entice you to come join the fun?

Great interview with Eri Gentry, founder of Biocurious

UCSF biologist Jeff Tabor holds up an ecoli culture designed to display the shape of a squid.

Synthetic biology portends big changes in our lives by ushering in a dizzying array of applications in everything from medicine to biofuels, environmental remediation to agriculture. Though many of these applications haven’t yet come on line, researchers are hard at work to synthesize new drugs and devices made from genetic parts.

For example, there’s an enzyme that exists in plants which makes methyl halides, a molecule which can be catalytically converted into gasoline and other chemicals. Imagine if you could put this enzyme-making gene into yeast, then you could brew the yeast to churn out the methyl halides and after some optimization of the production pathway, you could scale up production to pump out this carbon neutral gasoline precursor for use in today’s automobiles. This is the idea behind an innovative biofuels project that has taken off in the lab of Chris Voigt at UCSF’s School of Pharmacy.

Voigt and his team surveyed the genetic database for the presence of the gene that encodes for the enzyme that makes methyl halides. Lo and behold, the gene exists in plants as diverse as ice plant, which dots the northern California coast, bok choy and pinot noir grapes. After building a library of about 100 enzymes from these diverse plants, the researchers had to determine which of these would function best in the yeast. They zeroed in on an enzyme from ice plant and then used the tool of DNA synthesis to translate the gene for the enzyme that makes methyl halides into something that would work in yeast.

The remarkable thing about this project is that the researchers never actually touched any of the plants. They simply “Googled” a genetic database to find all the genes out there in plants that produce the enzyme that makes methyl halides. As Professor Voigt says, “it’s incredible that synthetic biology is something that could really unlock the potential of using organisms in order to produce fuels.”

Watch the video made by the Voigt Lab demonstrating the combustible property of their synthetically derived methyl halides:

QUEST on KQED Public Media. Video courtesy of
Prof. Chris Voigt, UCSF School of Pharmacy

Watch the Decoding Synthetic Biology television story online.

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