Hi,

Sorry for the long delay between posts! Both Eri and I have been busy traveling. We recorded some great interviews at the Open Science Summit last weekend, though, and will be getting a new episode on citizen science posted sometime towards the end of the week.

In the meantime, if anyone would like to give me feedback on my upcoming TEDxVictoria talk on biohackerspaces I’d love it! You can watch a dry run at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urN92EiFSaw

Thanks!

–Derek

Bacterial Transformation [ 45:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (526)

Hi, I have a solo podcast for you today. Won’t do this very often, but Eri is off at SynBERC this weekend and I didn’t have an interview lined up. We’re trying really hard to keep podcasts going up at least every other week. It was a good opportunity to talk in more detail about bacterial transformation. This is kind of the hello world of synthetic biology, so it’s important to understand in detail.

I also wanted to get ideas on a TEDxVictoria talk that I’m trying to put together to explain to a lay audience just why it is that I’m so excited about getting biology out into the hackerspaces. I’d love to hear any comments you might have – examples to include, etc. Please send feedback to mailbag@garagebio.org

(I’m also still trying hard to work on show audio. I think I over-processed today’s audio because the low-bitrate mp3 sounds horrible to me. Here it is if the higher quality one is too much to download, though: http://s3.amazonaws.com/garagebio/pod4.mp3)

Links:
my writeup on the transformation class
Richard Resnick’s great talk on genomic data
some higher efficiency chemical transformation techniques
Electroporation
The Bio-Rad CaCl protocol
The recent DIY Bio transformation thread
Finally, I fumbled around a bit on the ampicillin mechanism discussion, here’s a better description

Episode 3: OpenPCR and GeneLaser [ 51:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (602)

This was a really fun podcast to record. Eri and I went out on a sailboat trip on SF bay with Tito Jankowski, the founder of Pearl Biotech and co-founder of OpenPCR. Josh Perfetto, co-founder of OpenPCR and Cofactor Bio sailed the boat. And we chatted with Mac Cowell, founder of DIYBio and co-founder of Cofactor Bio.

Sorry if the boat noises in the background are distracting! We should be going to more traditional interviews now that I’m back in Canada and Eri and I are doing this remotely over Skype. We also have a new mic for local interviews now.

Thanks a lot to Josh for inviting us all along on his sailing adventure! He’s taking classes at the OCSC sailing school out of the Berkeley marina and we got to take out an awesome Beneteau 373. Enjoy!

As always, please send comments to mailbag@garagebio.org

Links:
http://www.pearlbiotech.com/
http://openpcr.org/
GeneLaser (a product of Cofactor Bio)
http://diybio.org/
OCSC Sailing School

Ethics of genetic testing [ 1:07:12 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (545)

Here in episode 2, Eri and Derek speak with Raymond McCauley. Raymond is the head of the biotech track at Singularity University. He and Derek ran a potentially controversial series of classes this summer. Derek also had the chance to speak with Misha Angrist, the author of Here is a Human Being and one of the earliest members of the Personal Genome Project. Everyone has a right to their own genome!

(oh, and a mistake in the podcast… Mac Cowell was still in Boston when we recorded the interview with Misha, but he’s now in SF! West coast wins again BTW. sorry about all the background noise in the second half, I’m still working on audio and it will get better!)

Links:
BioCurious website
Singularity University
Here is a Human Being
Berkeley’s Bring your DNA to school controversy
Exposing the student body
Stanford’s genomics course
CoFactor Bio
Open PCR