by Cathal Garvey, of www.indiebiotech.com
Creative Commons Attribution, Sharealike: Feel free to modify, share, or publish this work provided that credit is given to me for the original work (with a link to indiebiotech.com) and that the derived work or publication is released under the same license. Share, share alike.
These are protocols designed or adapted by me or by others to suit the needs or resources of the biohacking community. Wherever possible, instrumentation requirements are minimised and careful substitutions are made for more easily accessible ingredients.
These protocols are designed with biohacking in mind, but can equally be applied to science education, the most forbidding part of which is often the procurement of a workable set of equipment for the large class sizes usually involved. By minimising equipment and focusing on cheap ingredients, educational barriers to biotechnology are hopefully reduced.
These protocols will likely form the basis of an all-in-one guide to biohacking, complete with background information and theoretical concerns of molecular biology from the angle of an interested angle. This "Biohacker's Cookbook" is a work in progress: I appreciate input at every stage of the writing/designing process, and an issue or pull request on Github is a welcome format for input.
So far, the following protocols are included:
- Several "Miniprep"-scale plasmid purifications
- Transformation of E.coli with PEG-3350 (Common Laxative) and MgSO4 (Common bath-salt)
- Transformation of B.subtilis by natural competence
Planned for revision or addition:
- Isolation of Lysozyme from chicken egg using Isopropanol
- Isolation of agarose from food-grade agar
- Crude "boiling" miniprep method: easier to perform, likely to be worse purity