Plasmids. The mere mention of the word brings tingles to the spine of the bio-engineer. Little circles of DNA, awaiting to be cleaved, replicated and spliced. One of my old friends, Melina Fan, started a non-profit called AddGene whose sole mission is devoted to the collection of these tiny morsels of life. I think she looks at it more from the biologist’s perspective, that being her background, but as an engineer and hacker, I look at it more as the start of a DigiKey or findchips of the bio-world. Well, it’s not a full-service broker yet for all parts bio-engineering, but maybe someday I’ll be able to order my cell membrane liposaccharide coding sequences from them and my DNA polymerase kit to hack a little local flavor into my favorite bio-sensor transducer bacteria. Someday…could be fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Biology, Hacking, Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.