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Way too long ago, I bought a used thermocycler on ebay. It's quite a monster, a Perkin Elmer Cetus, and I've been meaning to test it. I initially thought about testing it simply by running a PCR and seeing whether I get the expected results, but there are so many sources of error in this plan that I've discarded it. There are just so many things that can go wrong with a PCR, even if the thermocycler works perfectly - not least due to my very limited lab skills. So instead, I'm going to measure the temperature of the heating block over a few cycles. There are even sources on the internet that document the temperature profiles of other thermocyclers, so I can use those as a reference. All in all, this approach does not only yield quantifiable results, but seems more attainable to me. Plus, this will (ideally) produce a setup that allows me to test other thermocyclers, too. So. After some investigation of temperature sensors in general and in particular, I decided to use...

Here are some ruminations about the first steps I'm taking towards a kind of Ghetto Sanger sequencing contraption: Basically, what I'm trying to build is a setup that will automate some of the steps in Sanger sequencing. One of these steps involves automatically starting a gel electrophoresis, which includes placing the gel into the buffer-filled gel box, firing up the power source, monitoring the gel's progress, shutting down the power source in time and removing the gel from the gel box. One of the problems here is that gels are somewhat difficult to handle for something like a robotic arm. It's much like trying to transfer a slab of Jell-O into a water bath and then out again. So my idea was to use plastic slides with gel-filled channels. Let's call them gel slides for short. The material should be non-conductive, transparent, and withstand a certain a mount of heat. Here's a sketch of one, with 8 channels, 6 of them are sketched as being gel-filled: Init...

There seems to be some confusion as to what these concepts mean and how they differ. I'll make an attempt at clarification and explain what these three terms - Synthetic biology, DIYbio, Biohacking - mean to me. Synthetic biology (synbio) : This is an academic field of study that moves the focus from biology as an activity of observation to one of manipulation. One motivation here is that of understanding by synthesis, much like a beginning electronics enthusiast would build a circuit from scratch to understand how the different components interact, what happens when you leave out one component, how the behaviour of the circuit changes when you use a different resistor etc. Apart from this, one important idea in the synbio community seems to be that biotechnology should become a true engineering discipline, which requires standardization, abstraction, modularization, and componentization. This is the spirit behind BioBricks and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts . DI...