BioCurious

This will be a monthly short meetup to discuss, research, and write grants for BioCurious and the community projects hosted at BioCurious. We will be looking for volunteers to help with these efforts who want to learn more about how the grant process works.

This community project will use CRISPR to edit the DNA of human cell lines. We will meet every week on Thursday at 7 PM. During the first meeting, we will identify which gene we want to knock out and identify the appropriate cell line to make the knockout. In subsequent weeks, we will make CRISPR guide RNAs, clone them into a mammalian expression vector, and then transfect CAS9 with the guide RNA into human cells. The cell lines we generate will be open source and available for any community lab or project.

You do not need any prior experience or knowledge to join. This community project will primarily take place in the laboratory. You must wear close-toed shoes to go into the lab.

Come join our ongoing BioPrinter community project!

Did you know you can print live cells from an inkjet printer? Companies like Organovo are developing ways to 3D print human tissues and organs. But the basic technologies are so accessible that we wanted to play around with them ourselves.

We've built our own functioning bioprinter from a couple of old CD drives, an inkjet cartridge, and an Arduino. We probably won't be printing human organs any time soon, but how about printing a leaf from plant cells? Or add a BlueRay laser to turn it into a miniature laser cutter to print "lab-on-a-chip" microfluidic devices. The possibilities are endless - it all depends where you want to take it!

Our community projects are open to anyone, and are driven entirely by whoever wants to show up and participate. This is a great opportunity to come check out BioCurious, and jump into some of the projects going on.

This project has something for everyone, whether it's hardware hacking. programming, Arduinos, microfluidics, synthetic biology, plant biology, cell culturing, tissue engineering - you name it! Everyone has something to learn, or something to teach.

Check out the progress we've made so far in our BioPrinter instructable:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-BioPrinter/

We'll try to give a brief intro to the project at the start of the meeting for any new visitors. This is a hacking meeting, so bring your favorite tools: laptop, camera, soldering iron etc. Younger kids must be accompanied by an adult, thanks.

Every other Friday at 7:00pm online

Meetings will be hosted ONLINE

Molluscan Mysteries: Began as studying the RNA Editing capabilities of the dwarf cuttlefish along with their basic biology and has now grown to a study of oysters.

This is an ongoing meeting of a group of citizen scientists that aim to dive deep into the genome of Sepia bandensis (dwarf cuttlefish). Our plan is to perform genome and transcriptome analysis of this species, ultimately leading to the identification of highly edited RNA transcripts. We hope to leave with a clear picture of experimental design but we hope to find a correlation between changing environmental conditions and RNA editing capabilities. For added fun, the edited proteins can be expressed and analyzed for structure and function!

In addition to studing the genome of the cuttlefish, we are exploring their basic biology and how to create cell lines.

THIS COMMUNITY PROJECT IS OPEN TO: all community members seeking to dive deep into genome/transcriptome analysis. Attendees must be middle school aged or older.

If you have bioinformatics or cuttle wranglin' experience or experience setting up and managing a reef tank, your participation would be greatly valued!