Comment by koeng

Comment by koeng 19 hours ago

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I am working on making ultra-low cost freeze-dried enzymes for synthetic biology.

For example, 1 PCR reaction (a common reaction used to amplify DNA) costs about $1 each, and we're doing tons every day. Since it is $1, nobody really tries to do anything about it - even if you do 20 PCRs in one day, eh it's not that expensive vs everything else you're doing in lab. But that calculus changes once you start scaling up with robots, and that's where I want to be.

Approximately $30 of culture media can produce >10,000,000 reactions worth of PCR enzyme, but you need the right strain and the right equipment. So, I'm producing the strain and I have the equipment! I'm working on automating the QC (usually very expensive if done by hand) and lyophilizing for super simple logistics.

My idea is that every day you can just put a tube on your robot and it can do however many PCR reactions you need that day, and when the next day, you just throw it out! Bring the price from $1 each to $0.01 + greatly simplify logistics!

Of course, you can't really make that much money off of this... but will still be fun and impactful :)

the__alchemist 17 hours ago

As a bio hobbyist, this is fantastic! I don't do enough volume of PCR to think of it as expensive, but your use case of high-volume/automatic sounds fantastic! (And so many other types of reagents and equipment are very expensive).

Some things that would be cool

  - Along your lines: In general, cheap automated setups for PCR and gels
  - Cheap/automatic quantifiable gels. E.g. without needing a kV supply capillary, expensive QPCR machines etc.
  - Cheaper enzymes in general
  - More options for -80 freezers
  - Cheaper/more automated DNA quantification. I got a v1 Quibit which gets the job done, but new ones are very expensive, and reagent costs add up.
  - Cheaper shaking incubator options. You can get cheap shakers and baters, but not cheap combined ones... which you need for pretty much everything. Placing one in the other can work, but is sub-optimal due to size and power-cord considerations.
  - More centrifuges that can do 10kG... this is the minimum for many protocols.
  - Ability to buy pure ethanol without outrageous prices or hazardous shipping fees.
- Not sure if this is feasible but... reasonable cost machines to synthesize oglios?
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  • koeng 10 hours ago

    I've thought a lot about this! My main goal is to create a cloud lab that doesn't suck - ie, a remote lab that is actually useful for people, and a lot of these are relevant things. Let me run down the ideas I have for each

    1. You can purchase gel boxes that do 48 to 96 lanes at once. I'd ideally have it on a robot whose only purpose is to load and run these once or twice a day. All the samples coming through get batched together and run

    2. Bioanalyzer seems nice for quantification of like PCRs to make sure you're getting the right size. But if I'll be honest I haven't though that much about it. But qPCRs actually become very cheap, if you can keep the machines full. You can also use something like a nanodrop and it is much much cheaper

    3. Pichia pastoris expression ^

    4. You can use a plate reader (another thing that goes bulk nicely), but the reagents you can't really get around (but cheaper in bulk from China)

    5. If you aggregate, these become really cheap. The complicated bits are getting the proper cytomat parts for shaking, as they are limited on the used market

    6. These can't be automated well, so I honestly haven't thought too much about it.

    7. Reagents cheaper in bulk China

    8. ehhhh, maybe? But not really. But if you think about a scaled centralized system, you can get away with not using oligos for a lot of things

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desireco42 14 hours ago

That sounds really cool. I wouldn't agree you can't make money off this, you can make money off anything, just find people who need this and it seems you did find it.

Anyhow good luck. Would love to follow if you do anything with this in the future. Do you have a blog or anything?

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