Open Source Biotech Consumables

If a start-up wishes to make big bucks in biohacking it has to deliver a product that is in wide demand by the general public.<p>The reagents on sale mentioned (Taq, antibiotic resistance genes and DNA ladders) are to biotech what solder and resistors are to electronics, i.e. very low value products of no use to the general public.<p>The real hurdle for true &quot;biohacking&quot; is the cost of laboratory facilities and equipment, which can easily run into a million dollars as soon as high speed centrifuges, -70 C freezers, sterile incubators and hoods, equipment for analysis, certified waste disposal facilities, etc, etc, are taken into account.<p>Compare this to making an app, which costs mostly the developers time and some hardware she already has lying around.

I&#x27;ve been waiting so, so long for this to happen. I got my biotech undergrad degree at a smaller school that didn&#x27;t have the funding necessary to pay for common lab reagents, so our professors illegally generated their own taq polymerase and stuff (I think PCR was patented at the time). DIY biotech makes me excited about the field again, and this is a critical step in making that dream a tangible reality. Thank you!

This topic popped into my head during the HOPEX talk on biohacking yesterday. The thought was that diybio enthusiasts might be a perfect partner for the OpenBazaar project, who are building a decentralized p2p marketplace. It&#x27;s mostly associated with the drug trade atm.<p>I mentioned it in #openbazaar on irc, and they seemed interested. Toronto has one of the largest diybio groups in north america, and I&#x27;ve been to a few meetup, so I&#x27;d love to help look into it when I&#x27;m back in Toronto next week<p>frankly, I would be thrilled if the nixhe groups of both cryptocurrency and diybio found symbiosis :)

My slightly informed opinion about biotech consumables is that a plasmid construct is only half of the deal. What you need as well - and that is indispensable - is a competent technician who will isolate and purify the overexpressed protein and run assays to confirm activity.<p>Competent technicians don&#x27;t grow on trees. You are looking at a salary of 60 kUSD&#x2F;year + benefits, and then you start running numbers if reagent kits might actually be the cheaper option.

Our start up has been tackling this space of over priced chemicals and supplies for the past four years. We&#x27;ve worked with the majority of the DIYBio labs in the USA.<p>We&#x27;ve taken the approach of working with small manufacturers that already make products that are repackaged and marked up more than 10x.<p>John (author) is right that there is a huge need for more affordable reagents especially recombinant protein.

Wow! That&#x27;s pretty cool. The inability to order biological reagents as an individual is a huge barrier to people doing this stuff on their own.