With moss? That's going to be really tricky unless Splicer intends to buy a bunch of hormones to elicit the colour response or something?

Just an idea, no one said biohacking was going to be easy.

You could get the effect by engineering a colour response to a hormone and just writing your desired result in that hormone in agar, if you're using bacteria or moss of something. But not through engineering the colour changes into your organism.

A plant displaying the biohazard logo or some other radial pattern may be possible.

-dR

Good point, provided one could find a plant that grows the correct shape in the correct way. Fungi might be a better bet?

What would be interesting is if someone could find the gene that makes a plant grow radially, then reprogram it to eventually have the cells diferentiate (im guessing you would need to modify many genes for this) so that at a certain number of devisions it would turn a diferent color.

this would give you a simple ringa at first, but from that reaserch you could eventually find patterns and form equations to make diferent shapes. eventually the goal would be to be able to program things to diferentiate where you wanted them consistantly. imagine a computer program where you could type something and have it translated to a base pair sequence that would code for a display the text on the skin of your plant.

This is all exciting and everything but have or are you making these things?

Yeah, i've made a cherry-strawberry hybrid in my backyard, the plant grows like a shrub but strawberries grow from it each summer
Yeah in relation to yeast, i read you can expose it to alpha radiation and cause it to make baking soda
And finally, i'm working with a few friends to isolate a gene that could make a person capable of growing bones out of their body.

I wish you luck with your future projects,
BioHack'r

Hell of a gene

-dR

BioHack'r was joking.

From the early days of genetics up to the human genome project there was a popular idea that there would be a gene for every trait. You could find articles about the god gene, the gay gene and so on. The idea – in hindsight – was dumb and after the human genome project concluded humans only have around 25000 protein coding genes no one except sci-fi writers really bring up the idea any more. BioHack'r was joking about the ”Growing bones out of their body” gene... and about yeast making baking soda

I don't think he has a cherry-strawberry shrubbery either but apparently cherry branches can be grafted to apple trees at least... it's the kind of thing peoples grandmas would know about.

Welcome both of you

-Splicer

I'm not sure if Biohack'r meant an exoskeleton or a spare body part grown in a vat. I assumed he meant the body part, now I'm thinking maybe not... but the same goes for both:

They are both possible when it's understood how it's done. We don't right now, we're learning fast but there is so much we don't know yet.

The liver cell is an illustration. An artificial liver is interesting to use for testing new drugs. It's just one kind of cell if you can do away with the blood vessels, it grows on it own when given nutrition. It shouldn't be totally impossible to artificially grow something that behaves like a liver. But as it turns out it's complicated. Every cell interacts with it's environment, if the environment is not the same as in a body, it's still a liver cell but it won't behave like one. So one has to mimic blood flow, temperature, nutrition and probably cell signaling for it behave like it should. As of now, I think there is a crude “liver on a chip” artificial liver that's kind of useful for drug testing.

Something like a skeleton or limb is more complicated. We know something about how they are grown but not how build them yet. Even if we would let the body grow them we don't know how it's done. But we're learning fast.



I like this question. As far as I know there are only a handful of people who have done garage biology. They are well publicized people like Meredith Patterson and Kay Aull. I think for garage biology to take off we need the BioBricks. The BioBricks need the garage biology community too - to test the parts. And there is at least one company waiting for the permission to sell them to us. BioBricks are not rocket science.

The way I see it there are two ways to get the release process of the parts to the general public started. Either an DIYBio IGEM team or DIYBio backed hacker spaces. I think one of these will probably be the next step.

I don't think there will be a larger community that will build bio chemistry from scratch in the same way molecular biologists did in say the 50:is and 60:is. There needs to be a reasonably simple way in. Right now BioBricks are it.

-Splicer

http://www.kitchenculturekit.com/StiffA ... byists.htm

I think this is definitely biopunk I will start gathering the materials next week:) Too bad examine period is in a month:( Do you guys know if plant cells would accept and express GFP plasmid? Or luciferase or something else that glows. I think it would be a fun start...

It... doesn't work like that. You'd affect too many other things.



I'm not at the moment. I'm about to do some genetic analysis on the heavy metal tolerance of microorganisms, so more analysis than engineering at the moment for me.