Amateur biotechnology

Well Biotechnology is probably not the right term.
Biotech would be very very hard to do at home, as it would falter at preliminary things such as cloning etc. (for the lack of restriction enzymes etc)
Anyway, I actually was going to make some threads on simple biochemistry experiments, or even experiments with fruit flys - which are easy to get hold of of course.
So just be patient ... and you'll get some DIY stuff

PS I didnt find much on 'hobby biochemistry' either, at least on the web. Best is to get some OLD biochem/mol. biol. book, and do some reading. The old methods were actually quite simple and don't require a huge amount of chemicals.

Bugs?? Strains?? Strains of bugs?

Do you mean species? Or is "bug" a slang for bacteria? But you cant poke bacteria with a stick.

Edit: Live insects dont usually flip over and stay that way for 2 weeks

[Edited on 5-2-2004 by Saerynide]

biotech - yeast - etc

The best starting point for an amateur scientist is yeast - because of nontoxicity, availability and the endless possibilities these creatures have - only in parts known up to now.

As soon I find out how to extract the damned bookmarks on this topic from the OPERA browser I will post them here - enough to do for all interested ones I guess...

tip

Massa Buana Polverone!

Not the whip! No, pleaze not the....outch

tacho

working with bakers yeast is a very good start. It is often forgotten that yeast is alive and brewing beer is an art.
One has to have gained some experience with these animals and their respiratory cycles - this is the key to success in whole-cell based biotech processes.

Add some MgSO4 to the broth and stirr it for aeration from time to time

And monitor and note the ph! Thats most interesting and ph control is essential in further experiments. So try to keep the ph on a constant level by adding some H3PO4 or an organic acid (diluted of course) - thats not so easy as it sounds and is the main reason for non-working processes. By the ph you also monitor the respiratory cycles I spoke of before.

Ok - this thread is somehow very broad range, so maybe it'd be better to start new threads on the respective topics

Anyway, Organikum, since you mention membrane technology - this is used in large scale isolation of all sorts of biological compounds (you mention enzymes/proteins for starters). Very difficult to do this yourself though. Such membranes are not easy to make, and difficult to get hold of. Dialysis membranes are probably the easiest to come by, but I wouldnt know where to get them OTC. I was always thinking of cellophane, which seems permeable with a certain molecular weight cut off. But, there are other ways to purify proteins, ways which are simpler and can be done at home. I will, given the time, make a thread on protein purifcation - in fact this the major area of my expertise
Tacho - you mention working with all sorts of moulds/bacteria found in the soil, water etc. But as Organikum said, for starters it's probably easiest to work with bakers yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae). Else, you could work with the lactobacillus strains found in yoghurts, or on Escherichia Coli found in your intestine and isolatable from your excrements.
The problem with any other species is to isolate it, and find the conditions at which it grows. THe reason why so many single-cell organisms exist and yet have not been characterised is because it is not known how to culture them, in isolation. For instance, there are a lot of bacteria that cannot exist on their own, they live because they have a symbiotic (metabolic ) relationship with other bacteria. Look at, for instance, the bacteria in your mouth, particularly on teeth and holes thereof. There are multiple layers of bacteria, all different species, and together they form a highly effective multilayer bacterial system that degrades your teeth, and is hard to study in isolation.
As to the study of fungi - I think that is feasible to some extent. But you don't need things like alginate, moist crumbled bread, or even moist toilet paper will do. Play with it (there are plenty of variations as to what you could use for growth medium, plus plenty of conditions (temperature, pH, (an)aerobic etc)), and see what grows on it. Then take one of the offspring and culture it in isolation, under sterile conditions. I am sure you could isolate tens of species that way. Same goes for fungus/bacteria in compost. There are books available that look at fungi in detail, and you should be able to identify some of them with a simple microscope (there are cheap ones available, and they are certainly sufficient for fungi... but most like not for bacteria as they are considerably smaller)

Then.. how would you look at the 'chemical behaviour' of those fungi/bacteria? What property are you looking for? It has to be something measurable. You could do something simple like giving those bugs only sunflower oil to eat (triglycerides) - and hope for fatty acid production etc. Or give them only glycerin/H2O. I will look into this, as to how to tweak them to make lots of lactic acid, or pyruvic acid, or esters etc.

Oh, here is a cool one to try for yourself: I once isolated some very mysterious fungus that was able to grow in phosphate buffered saline (i.e. 50 mM NaPi pH7 and 100 mM NaCl). A liter was kept in a bottle, with hardly any air in it, for a few months, at which point a white mycelium grew at the bottom of the bottle! I thought this is fascinating as there is SOO little present for the fungus to grow on! I.e. probably a bit of CO2 from the air, hardly any oxygen... and yet growth! If you manage to culture that, that would be fantastic! Study of an organism taht grows at sub-minimal conditions!

[Edited on 7-2-2004 by chemoleo]

Hulk, if you were to scan those books and put them online, I am sure FTP access could be arranged within minutes

Oh, I think the main bulk of the work is scanning. If you can get high res scans done on the pages (600 dpi, 256 grey tone, or so they say), then I am sure some member will be happy to help in OCRing this and converting this to pdf format.
I think anyone who scans a book will have forum-love guaranteed forever - providing it's a good and interesting book, of course.

More info is here:
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=2442

Has anyone read up on the Tobbaco Mosaic Virus?
It's a single-strand RNA virus, apx 6 genes and is a stick type virus( not very knowledgeable with this subject). My bio textbook says that under reaction with "agents such as concentrated acetic acid" the RNA and proteins fall apart! Is that cool or what Not only this, but TMV can also "spontaniously reassemble under suitable conditions", reforming TMV thats "indistinguishable in structure and infectivity"
Cool.

Reading on some more, this virus stuff is pretty interesting, but alas, I fear experimenting in this feild is probably impossible to us
I wonder if it's possibe to replace the DNA.Just think of the experimenting we could do..