[BBF Standards] individual BioHacker

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sunday 09 March 2008, mantese at msn.com wrote:
> Hi.  I dont' have access to wet-lab space and would like to try to
> setup something in my apartment to do some BioBrick work. I'd
> appreciate any thoughts on how I should start going about this.
>
> Looking through the protocols, these are some of the necessary items
> that I've identified: pipettes
> Petri dishes
> Agar
> PCR kit (those are available commercially)
> E. Coli
> specific enzymes found on the "Materials section" of Biobricks.org
>
> Several questions:
> 1. I don't want to have E.Coli around, are there some interesting
> yeast experiments?
>
> 2. There are very many materials (restriction enzymes, buffers, etc)
> listed under the "Materials section". Can these be paired down to the
> beginner's working essentials?
>
> 3. As an aside, I work (full-time at a startup) and live in the SF
> Bay Area. If there might be a way I could collaborate with someone,
> or at least see how a real lab is setup, it would be very much
> appreciated.
>
> Apologies if I sent an email to the incorrect forum. Take care and
> thanks much! Lucy

Hey Lucy, 

First, the bbf-standards mailing list might not be the place for you. 
You can try hplusroadmap and the syntheticbiology.org mailing lists if 
you can't get all that you need here. 

Second, you need to do more than what is necessary in your case. You are 
in an apartment, and things could get kind of rough, so make sure you 
have lots of documentation on what precisely you want to do, print out 
the precise instructions plus precise "what to do in an emergency" 
instructions, safety stuff, etc., plus a history of the receipts of the 
products you've bought from where-ever (even if it's local liquidiation 
services or from craigslist, just jot them down in a notebook). Though 
there's little chance for screwups to occur, you can't be too safe, 
especially when you're going solo. Also: please blog the hell out of 
your work and so on. :)

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/