Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1138
35 WWW.HPLusmAGAzINe.COm 35 WWW.HPLusmAGAzINe.COm 35 35 h+: how did you get involved with synthetic biology and dIYbio? mereDITH PATTersON: Well, this goes back to about 2003. I was just starting my PhD in computer science at the university of Iowa, and I didn't know yet whether I was going to have a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship, so I was looking for a part- time job, and ended up taking an internship in the Bioinformatics department at Integrated DNA Technologies. my boss there was a guy named Andy Peek, who just recently became director of bioinformatics and biostatistics at roche. He's a really hands-on kind of guy and remembers the days when everything in a wet lab was done with cobbled-together equipment. so we'd talk about stuff like how to do PCr without a thermocycler, or how to isolate DNA using only common household items, like mac's "DNA shot" instructable. Fast forward to 2005. I was working on sciTools, which is IDT's web-based primer design toolkit, and I got accepted to give a talk on it at CodeCon (a software display conference). As an intro to the talk, I isolated chickpea DNA using non-iodized salt, shampoo, meat tenderizer, and a salad-spinner for a centrifuge, and that really blew people away. so that was the point when I started spending my free time reading old papers and thinking more about how to do more advanced genetics research at home. Fast forward again to last summer, when Len (sassaman, Patterson's husband) and I were in Houston for my sister's wedding and were hanging out at the home of some geek friends of mine. I'd had the idea for GFP yogurt several years before, and we were talking about that, and the conversation progressed to what other kinds of things you could make yogurt bacteria produce. Len hit on vitamin C, and we all went "Whoa, we could cure scurvy with yogurt." When we got back to san Francisco, that was when I went full- bore ahead on building out my lab. I found the DIYbio list a couple of weeks later, and the rest is history. h+: You also talked about probiotics, yes? mP: Yup. After all, lactobacilli are an important symbiote in the human gut. That's why doctors recommend you load up on yogurt after a course of antibiotics, to restore the normal balance of your gut fl ora. This is just taking the notion of probiotics to a whole new level. :) h+: there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of people doing this sort of research at home. do you think this is over-exaggerated? mP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment outside a laboratory are vanishingly low. rudy rucker has a great quote on that, "I have a mental image of germ-size mIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology research. When we design a transgenic organism, we're deliberately adding one specifi c piece of new functionality, maybe a small pathway that leads to a new piece of functionality — and the organism has to expend energy on producing the new proteins that those new genes code for. Because of this, the synthetic organism is necessarily less competitive than its wild-type relatives who are much better suited for the niche they already occupy in the environment. the bioweather map could augment the way we understand epidemiology on a micro scale. When we open science up to the public, we... always get useful results. the public, we... always get useful results.