Thought that podcast was very interesting. I bought the book - 'textbook of sake brewing' a while ago. I've brewed beer before, but rather fancy trying making sake.
My grandparents were publicans 70+ years ago. Even they they made very little on beer. All the profit was spirits and software drinks. Probably food as well now.
You could buy a bottle of Teachers and serve yourself 25ml for 70p. You could buy a bottle of 30-year aged Macallan matured in sherry oak, and serve yourself 25ml for £160.
In a pub, you should be able to get a shot of blended whisky for about £4-6, and mass-market single malts (the kind you also find in supermarkets) for about £5-£10.
If you don't ask for a specific whisky, they should ask you which one you want, and/or say "is name alright?" and give you one of the cheap ones.
I really need to do a write-up. I kinda just whip up the easiest path and do it.
For example for the grape, I needed to knock out some tryptophan synthesis genes so I could redirect the bioflux. Problem is that in bakers yeast they have a whole buncha copies of their chromosomes, so I had to knock out one of the genes and replace it with a different gene from grapes. Did that with a quick lil CRISPR switch.
Had to electroporate tho because the transformation rates on wild/bakers/non-lab yeast are so garbage
How much expensive lab equipment do you need to do something like this?
"A quick lil CRISPR switch" sounds like "oh just my homemade fusion reactor hooked up to my kitchen warp drive" to me, yet you make it sound so simple!
You can do this on your desk, or better yet at your local diy bio hackerspace. Validating it takes some equipment, e.g. for PCR, but that's commonly available.
Eh, other than the electroporator I could probably do it for about $100-$200 bucks of equipment if I had a decent kitchen.
Reagents probably about $300, but you can use em in a bunch of reactions, in aggregate down to like $50.
The fundamentals of biology are really cheap, but the skills to actually do it are really expensive. It’s way more manual than you imagine - like how my thumb moves. The equipment is way more fundamentally basic than you imagine: the only thing you can’t 3d print and build from off-the-shelf stuff is the instant pot I use for media prep
I’d recommend buying an Odin kit and just trying it. Doesn’t take THAT much to get into genetic engineering.
The tough part is mostly the finesse in the simple things, like trying this in bakers yeast rather than lab yeast, or the genetic design.
Cost is quite high for mistakes, but LLMs are honestly quite good to help you out with the basics. You MUST at least try to read the papers though - it’s not like coding where you can mostly let it do its thing.
If you can find a nearby community college offering a molecular biology class that includes a practical lab then I'd say a couple quarters of time and tuition.
DIY that will depend on your level of ability. You can do this stuff in your kitchen but learning it from a textbook will be daunting for many (most?) people.
Already answered there: I’m using bakers yeast, not lab yeast (store-bought S cerevisiae). It’s not haploid, often it’s tetraploid. HR doesn’t guarantee homozygous transformation.
Same answer for electroporation vs spheroplasty. I’ve found with wild yeasts or less tamed yeasts (pichia), sometimes just nuking the damn thing with kV will just work, whereas those chemical methods can be way more finicky. Time is money
Trying to visualise magnetic fields of a floppy disk.
So far I can see magnetic fields on a magstripe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw with two polarisers (one of which I rotate in the video, which is contained in a 3D printed holder with gears I made).
I'm awaiting some different polariser film, to see if I can get it to work with a floppy disk.
Trippy! Please do a large-format visual art installation of the results of this... like, project it on a wall or on some other public surface that is... unexpected.
The prototype in the linked video was first tested back in 2023, and since then a few startups have set their sights on the technology (e.g. Nomadic Drones and Voltair).
When working on the linked prototype we ran into some fundamental issues. Firstly, the recharging will only work with AC lines, and there's currently a lot of hype around UHVDC lines which are not compatible. Secondly, the AC lines must carry substantial current (ideally thousands of amps) for the recharging to not take forever. You can of course carry a much larger transformer on the drone to compensate, but this will in turn severely limit your flight time (ours was 1kg on a drone of 4.5kg and we could charge with 50W from 300A line current). You also have to account for significant daily fluctuations in the line current. It'll be interesting to see how the tech evolves, and I'll definitely be following these startups closely.
I used these two polarisers in my microscope and a magneto-optical sensor (which exploits the faraday effect), to visualise magnetic field lines of a magstripe card - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw
I intend to try to use with a floppy disk, however it's not currently working for that.
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