Biohacking at London Hackspace

Ah, yeah. So, I am a member of London Hackspace and do some stuff there. If you are in London or if you want to travel to London, please come and see us.

http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Project:Biohacking

This was originally a 10 minute slide set, so I will try to answer questions. I got involved in this as an undergrad when doing a molecular biology course. It was expensive, difficult, it gets booked out about a year before it runs. I heard about these guys at London Hackspace, so I went and our mission. This is really nice because we mostly do stuff, and when we sit around and think about the presentation and what's our mission, we just think, well, we just do it. We went over the stuff we're doing it, and it seems to fit the bill.

So once a week on Wednesday night and occassionally more often, we've been working on this pretty hard for quite a long time. There's the X, Y chromosomes. You PCR it, you get the DNA, you do genomic extraction, you run it through PCR, then when you do gel electrophoresis if you have a male then the bands will have separated. This slide has disappeared which is probably just as well. Coming from a computing background, this is disorienting I guess. There was a slide here about not being rocket science. It's not difficult to get these things.

We got a thermocycler. We got this for $500 on ebay. It does the job. But there are conversations about making kits to do the same jobs in different ways.