Assuming it’s not illegal, how does one begin biohacking? I gather that it’s more than just a literary device. Is there a primer all n00bs should read?
Thanks,
Rob
Assuming it’s not illegal, how does one begin biohacking? I gather that it’s more than just a literary device. Is there a primer all n00bs should read?
Thanks,
Rob
“Biohacking” is a pretty broad term. Are you looking to improve your memory, strength, stamina, metabolism, teeth brightness, etc?? The answer sort of depends on what specific result you’re looking for.
I was thinking about manufacturing buckytubes or something, rather than dosing myself with a bunch of goo to make myself into Captain America. Is there one area that is simpler than others which may yield an deeper understanding of the other areas?
Thanks,
Rob
With what goal in mind, precisely?
Phase 1) Manufacture buckytubes or something
Phase 2) ???
Phase 3) Profit!
It doesn’t have to be buckytubes. I was interested more in molecular scale manufacturing. I don’t necessarily want to do it, I just want to learn about it.
Rob
There are industrial processes that use genetically engineered organisms of various sorts to manufacture certain things, mostly pharmaceuticals as far as I know. “Biologicals” are specific sorts of proteins that are used as drugs, and the only practical way to make larger proteins is to get some organism to make it for you. Usually it’s a genetically engineered bacteria, yeast, or mammalian cell line. This is conceptually simple to do: just add a gene for your protein to a bacteria, grow it in batches, and extract your protein. But it’s tricky produce large quantities of pharmaceutical-grade biologicals, which is why some of these drugs can cost five or six figures for a single course of treatment.
With more sophisticated genetic engineering, you can create organisms that produce some sort of small molecule (again usually for pharmaceuticals). This requires adding several different enzymes that will build your molecule step-by-step. It’s a lot more complicated because each step in the pathway has to be carefully tuned to produce the desired output. (For some reason I thought this approach has been used to produce a few small-molecule drugs at commercial scales, but I can’t find any examples right now). Still, this approach is also being investigated to produce fuels, i.e. making a bacteria that produces ethanol from cellulose, or algae that produce diesel fuel.
There’s a sort of nascent “biohacking” community, where people attempt to do this sort of engineering in their garages and basements. The DIYbiogroup has a lot of information. Still, it’s a seriously expensive and difficult pursuit. If you want to make your own basic molecular biology lab on the cheap, it’ll cost many thousands of dollars and a lot of time and effort. A more sophisticated laboratory setup can be easily cost five or six (or seven!) figures. As far as I know, none of these DIY genetic engineers have invented anything commercially useful.
Are you interested in nanoscale material engineering or biomolecular engineering? ‘Buckyballs’ and carbon nanotubes are organic molecules (being formed out of carbon) but are not biological in nature.
If you want to understand biological production and use of molecules, a good start is Goodsell’s The Machinery of Life. Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life is a reasonably good introduction to consumer biotechnology available. I haven’t yet read Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, but the author is a leading figure in genomic sequencing and the Kirkus review describes it as “A heady overview of the emerging discipline of synthetic biology and the wonders it can produce, from new drugs and vaccines to biofuels and resurrected wooly mammoths.”
Although this isn’t something you are going to reproduce on the kitchen counter, a team at the University of Washington has successfully developed synthetic proteins with predictable conformal patterns, i.e. they can predict how the proteins will interact with other molecules under a range of conditions. They are also much hardier than most organic proteins and could therefore be used to make protein structures that can withstand more extreme conditions than natural biologically proteins.
The kind of molecular biohacking you can do at home is largely limited to taking existing or industrially-modified bacteria (such as strains of Escherichia coli, the common intestinal bacteria) and exposing them to different reactants and conditions to create an enforced evolution. Actually making “bitwise” changes in the genome would require gene sequencing equipment (and a very sterile lab space) which, while dramatically less expensive than it was even ten years ago, is still beyond the ability of the dilettante home scientist.
Stranger
I think I am going to request that this be my new username. Thanks for the book suggestions.
Rob
It’s been a while since I’ve paid much attention to the nitty gritty, but there are a variety of ways that you can introduce new genetic material into bacteria. They’re not nearly as picky about what sequences they pick up as eukaryotes are–i.e., cells with a nucleus. However there are techniques for modifying them as well and I think some like viral vectors may be within the reach of the biohacker.
As a general rule these folks form cooperatives where they share lab space and equipment since if you’re serious about it gets very expensive very quickly. DNA sequencers aren’t cheap.
Just ask Gene Hackman.
But what is cheap is sending out DNA to be sequenced. My institution has a $40,000 DNA Analyzer that no one’s used in three years because it’s cheaper and less hassle to send the DNA out to a commerical lab that will sequence it for you.
As someone who worked in a molecular biology lab in grad school, it’s surprisingly easy to do a lot of stuff that you would call “biohacking” assuming you have a modestly appointed molecular/microbial biology lab. Unfortunately, that will cost you many thousands of dollars, although you could probably find some deals if you made friends with all the research scientists at your local university and asked if they had any old stuff sitting around they wanted rid of. But if you can figure out a way to get access to the equipment, simply inserting a piece of DNA into a bunch of E. coli is something that I’ve seen high school students do. I’ve also seen glowing green beer made by splicing a GFP gene into some brewers yeast. That was done by a friend in undergrad who wasn’t even a biologist (he was an engineer). If you’re serious about learning some of this stuff, I suggest getting your hands on some current molecular biology textbooks and getting access to a proper university library, with electronic access to the scientific literature.
The term sequencer as I understand it applies to both analyzing strands as you do with electrophoresis but also building custom oligonucleotides. So it gets a little confusing, at least for me.
No, a “DNA sequencer” is a machine that “reads” your DNA sample. As Wevets noted it’s much cheaper now to send it out. Sequencing costs have actually decreased much faster than Moore’s law, what would have cost $5-10 thousand dollars 10 years ago can now be done for a few cents.
You use a nucleic acid synthesizer to make your own DNA. Well, I don’t know anyone who actually uses one, but the company whose website you go to to order your oligos uses one. Like with sequencing, only a few researchers have a need to make their own oligos when there are so many companies that can do it for you with less hassle. Custom sequences are still fairly expensive (25-50 cents per base pair?) and I believe are limited to relatively short sequences (a few hundred base pairs?). I could be wrong though, and I’m sure someone on the bleeding edge of the frontier like Craig Ventor can do significantly more (at significantly greater cost).
Very little genetic engineering is currently done by creating large sequences from scratch. Most is done by a set of cut, copy, paste, and edit reactions. Short pieces of synthetic DNA are necessary for PCR, which is a major technique used to copy and edit sequences. Little synthetic bits of DNA are used to add small useful sequences to whatever you’re working on – e.g. a protein tag, or something that will link two proteins together, or a new restriction (cut) site.
Short synthetic bits of DNA are pretty cheap by reagent standards, something like $5 for a 20-base pair sequence. You need to design two of these sequences for every PCR reaction.
Larger synthetic DNA sequences aren’t used routinely, because they’re still more expensive than the traditional cut and paste methods. Still, if you have the money you can order sequences up to a few thousand base pairs long, but it’ll cost a few thousand bucks as well. In comparison, the traditional methods are labor-intensive but much cheaper in terms of reagent costs.
Craig Venter has the money to synthesize an entire genome in pieces this size, and then pay an army of scientists to assemble the fragments into a whole genome.
I look forward to the day when kilobase-scale DNA synthesis is cheap and routine. Traditional molecular cloning is so tedious…