Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Biochemistry / Molecular Biology Project ideas

Hulk - 9-9-2004 at 08:28

A couple of projects I would like to work on are:

I found this in 2600 magazine that talked about adding a glow gene (luciferase) into E.Coli.

I found this on the web .

http://www.irational.org/biotech/issue01/skin.shtml

AT the end of the page it says

What to do with your living skin ?
What to do.? There is endless things to do with skin. Do you
want to make it Glow in the Dark ? Do you want it to talk directly to your computer by interfacing it with silicon ? Of course you do ! The next project installments will explain how to splice in a gene from Octopus that will make the skin glow.

This really excited me. Since I would like to learn tissue culturing as well as Mol Biol I thought this would be cool. So far I have not been able to find any more info on the subject but I will keep on trying.

With all the advances in Mol Biol and the amount of sequencing going on and the use of bioinformatics this all can become very exciting to the amateur scientist.

I know reagents and supplies will be hard to find and expensive, but finding ways to do these things is what amateur science is about. Being able to work on what you like and not being directed to work on boring things that institutes would make you do.

Hulk

chemoleo - 9-9-2004 at 08:54

Hulk, I split this topic, as things were diverging too far from the original topic (extraction of DNA). Please bear that in mind in the future.

Anyway...
Could you elaborate how you'd go about it?
Where would you get the luciferase gene from? You can order it, of course, but be prepared to pay.
Same goes for plasmids, primers, PCR reactants, cell lines, etc - and if you are starting from scratch, this costs you (from common suppliers like Qiagen, New England BIolabs, etc) at least a thousand pounds in excess.
Finding ways to do these things yourself? No chance. You can't synthesise DNA primers yourself, without massive equipment/funds. Ordering them is cheaper (about 80 pence per base). Nucleotides, Taq polymerase, homemade? Again, no chance. For the latter a trip to yellowstone or new Zealand is required. For the former a good chemical synth. lab.
Not to mention a PCR cycler, which admittedly can be done yourself once all the reagents are available.

I absolutely agree that it is exciting to find ways to do things such as these yourself. However, there are much less impossible tasks than trying to clone genes (unless, as usual, you have lots of spare money - and you can simply buy the reagents. Then, cloning luciferase is trivial. 2 Weeks and you'd have your glowing cell batch (btw on the subject of glowing bacteria, there already is a thread on it).

Tissue culturing? I'd start with plant cells. Some are actually very easy to culture. Mammalian cells... again you need reagents en masse. Serum, growth factors etc. Cloning into mammalian cells is not as easy as with bacteria. They are fickle, and die soon unless they are cancerous.

If you have more ideas, do write them here (as long as they don't involve heavy duty cloning), as I am myself interested in making biochem more accessible to the layman.

Hulk - 14-9-2004 at 10:13

According to the article in 2600 magazine you can purchase all the supplies at http://www.modernbio.com/ind-9.htm. Being from Canada I can't get it.They won't deliver chemicals or biologicals across the border. Next time I am at the library I will photocopy the article and scan it. Unless you guys already have it. This article also talked about a kit from Discovery Channel store
http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?...
Does anyone Have this kit or has used it? Is it worth while?

I spent this past weekend doing alot of reading and now I am beginning to understand how hard this is going to be. So I will do everything in small steps from DNA extraction to glowing bacteria, plant tissue culturing(I see there is a topic about that on here to),etc.

Hulk