These are  ideas that I’m working on at The Baltimore UnderGround Science Space.  The goal of this category of blog is to bravely get them out there, in this world of non collaborative hustlin’ that seems to be the MO of the biotech industry .   I hope to bring more commercial ideas to BUGSS so that they can be more safely sustainable both financially and,  well,  spiritually.  Biotech is such an important and powerful knowledge field to keep open to the masses so that it is not controlled by small special interest groups, and so that it can thrive and discover talent that better creates an imagined future that is inline with the values of everyone.  I hope to have several notes that will be distilled into separate pages on this website eventually. Right now I’m going to just serially throw them out there.

The first is this thought of developing faster ways to produce processes to produce high value chemicals or substances using biotechnology.

The main technologies to exploit are CRISPR/ Cas9 (or some derivative), cell free technologies, and something called SCRaMbLE which introduces some stochiastics to perhaps more rapidly do directed evolutions studies. I will publish some key notes of literature research I am doing on this.  My key concerns are that perhaps CRISPR editing could introduce the same effects as SCRaMbLE efficiently. Also do you really need to do any work with the cells themselves at all to achieve goals.

The proposed workflow is:

Estimation of genetic edits required to produce a product -> CRISPR applied to yeast -> SCRaMbLE -> Directed Evolution (grow colonies that are strong on whatever parameter you or chemical production you are trying to optimize) -> Cell Free Technology -> Make a product  makes sense and that I’m not missing anything.  I’m hoping that I can sketch out a process that is way more efficient than more standard methods

The next thing is light.

After becoming very excited about Light City in Baltimore  I want to have a project with very bright micro-organisms, and maybe transgenic animals and plants.  I will post some papers that might be good to check out.  This would include marine natural glowing bacteria, maybe some of the old Cambridge iGEM work, and a look at glowing transgenic plants and animals.  Reading will take at least 2 months

Then finally I want to do some sort of development of yeast and bacterial paints.  Again, I’ll post stuff as it happens