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This is what has happened in the last year. I talked with Mac when he was moving to California. This is what happened since there. This is the history as far as I know it, so Mac buys this thing called GreenFuel Lab in 2009 or something. There were various spaces, then it was moved into Sprout. Then there was some transformation attempts. Then Mac went to California. And then I appear. And since then, in 2011 and 2012, we did this, and ti was my favorite picture that I took in the last few moths.
"Stand back, I'm doing SCIENCE!" (xkcd shirt). We provide tools and classes and infrastructure. It's very difficult, you'll see a picture a bit later. Bringing people from different fields together. We had a successful hardware meeting yesterday while I was gone, and we will see the results of that online. When we started, I thought there were a lot of DIYbio people out there. I thought you guys were doing biotech all the time, just all these labs... that you guys grow bacteria and stuff. It turns out that that's not the case. So that's what I'm trying to build towards.
This is what happened last summer. I got some squid. It annoyed people because it rotted for a few days and smelled terrible. So then I did some cultures of bioluminescent microbes. There they are, timelapse. I advise doing this at your friend's house because it's terrible. You should read the protocol carefully so that you don't have to smell it for too long. This didn't get me kicked out, and so I continued to do experiments. I am trying to bring more people in.
We had some people do some bioluminescent algae, because they grow in the dark. I dropped them after a few months. Here's a picture of them under a microscope. People have been trickling in for the past few months with one project or another, so we want some way to hae projects at bosslab. One way to get involved is through classes, which is primarily how equipment purchases are funded, including reagents and supplies.
We have biotech 101, everyone does this a bit differently. We do DNA extraction, running gels, transformation, safety and rules, like eating in the lab is not cool. Don't release these things in the wild. Here's Chris, Chris is learning about biology, this is one of the prototype classes. We did a GFP extraction, so that's what he's looking at.
Safety is important, we have this nice pressure cooker, that's what we use for sterilization. Everybody learns how to use it on the first day. And equipment, we have a lot of equipment, not all of it works, not all of it is setup, some of it is in boxes. Mac is partly responsible. It's very helpful to have space and have actual equipment to use.
The problem is consumables. The problem pays for how these things are paid for is solved by me doing classes and having people pay for these classes.
So, the future - there are some new projects, like a wild cidaries, and make some ciders I guess, and some people interested in hardware (Chris Templeman), in the PCR direction. He briefly had a product around $200 for a thermocycler, so he's helping with that front. We have the Blue Gene project- we want to clone a gene from a wildtype bacteria into a plasmid bacteria or something, and we want this to come to a space near you.
Here's another picture of some glowing bacteria, any questions?
Two-part question. I used to live in Davis Square.. are you renting out a commercial space? So, I forgot to talk about this. We're located inside Sprout. Sprout is a hackerspace, but not your average hackerspace. It's just people doing whatever they want, so we have this corner here, we have shelves for storing other things, and I guess I should talk some more about biosafety. We don't work with anything that is BSL 1, we have just one strand of bacteria, and it's standard ecoli. We briefly had algae before it all died. We tend to use more educational products because of how open it is, we don't use ethidium bromide, we use the terrible carolina blue stain, it's just awful, but that's what we use. It doesn't stain very well. Methylene blue? No, it may be some derivative, but it's supposedly non-toxic. It's terrible. These things go into safety considerations.
Where exactly in Davis Square? You know where the Dominos is? We're next to Dominos. We're on Google Maps. Did you know that rotten fish is quite toxic? If you eat it, yes. The bacteria are not that harmless, I had a friend who did a molecular biology course, and they said that this is the stuff that they shouldn't do at home. I know that these are toxicity related... I don't know if it's the glowing bacteria that is dangerous, but there are some things there.... so we incubated it at cold temperatures, so if it grew anything it wouldn't be anything harmful.
How many people are regularly at BOSSlab? I'd say we have about 3 or 4 people core. And then people who come in and take classes, pop in and out, so probably around 3 or 4, including me.
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