BioCurious

This is a weekly zoom call hosted by the Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious communities, for anyone interested in reviewing the week's science and news on COVID-19. Plus guest stars monkeypox, Ebola, RSV and influenza. We welcome your questions and are happy to discuss any articles or news you may have found.

The Real Vegan Cheese (https://realvegancheese.org/) project is an award-winning collaboration between BioCurious and our sister lab Counter Culture Labs (http://counterculturelabs.org/) in Oakland, to make real cheese without using any animals!

Real Vegan Cheese is a grassroots, non-profit research project working to produce real cheese using cellular agriculture. We add the genes for cheese proteins to yeast and other microflora, and turn them into little protein factories, then make real cheese by adding plant-based fats and sugars. Real Vegan Cheese is not a cheese substitute -- the cheesemaking process is just like using cow or goat milk! We are dedicated to Open Science and making sure the results of our research are available to the global community to enable a sustainable animal-free dairy industry.

We alternate Admin and Science meetups every other week. This week will be an Admin meeting, so expect to talk about website design, business plans, improving our outreach efforts on social media, and more. Want more science instead, then join us next week.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, all public meetings are shifting to ONLINE-ONLY. Please sign in on Meetup to see the Zoom connection info.

Looking for a cost effective space to work on a new biotech project? How about a creative space for early stage research in biotech?

Join us December 3rd for our monthly BioCurious Open House! We will be having monthly Open Houses to let people come in to see the latest expansion at BioCurious. Learn about the history of our community lab and how we can help you.

We have space available for startups and entrepreneurs, so stop by to learn more and see the space. Learn more about what makes BioCurious different from a traditional startup incubator.

Tuesday Dec 3rd 6pm - 7:30pm

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.

First Wednesday at 7:00pm online

Molluscan Mysteries: We aim to create the first immortalized cell line from a marine mollusk, namely Magallana gigas (syn. Crassostrea), the Pacific oyster. Our plan is to use CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the genes of oyster heart cells, knocking out p53 and Pten, two genes crucial to the regulation of the cell cycle. The loss of these tumor suppressor genes may allow the altered oyster heart cells to divide indefinitely in vitro. Accomplishing this will require us to learn a variety of laboratory skills and methods, including PCR, cell culture, electroporation, lipofection, cloning, and more!

THIS COMMUNITY PROJECT IS OPEN TO: all interested community members. Attendees must be middle school aged or older.

If you have experience with tissue culture, CRISPR/Cas9 transfection, marine biology, or general molecular biology, we’d love to talk to you!

This community project will use CRISPR to edit the DNA of human cell lines. We will meet every week on Thursday at 7 PM, but we will only take new members during posted meetup classes (typically the first Thursday of the month). 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.

This is a weekly zoom call hosted by the Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious communities, for anyone interested in reviewing the week's science and news on COVID-19. Plus guest stars monkeypox, Ebola, RSV and influenza. We welcome your questions and are happy to discuss any articles or news you may have found.

The Real Vegan Cheese (https://realvegancheese.org/) project is an award-winning collaboration between BioCurious and our sister lab Counter Culture Labs (http://counterculturelabs.org/) in Oakland, to make real cheese without using any animals!

Real Vegan Cheese is a grassroots, non-profit research project working to produce real cheese using cellular agriculture. We add the genes for cheese proteins to yeast and other microflora, and turn them into little protein factories, then make real cheese by adding plant-based fats and sugars. Real Vegan Cheese is not a cheese substitute -- the cheesemaking process is just like using cow or goat milk! We are dedicated to Open Science and making sure the results of our research are available to the global community to enable a sustainable animal-free dairy industry.

We alternate Admin and Science meetups every other week. This week will be a Science meeting, so expect to talk ranging from cheese proteins, how Lactobacilli create that cheesy flavor, physicochemical properties of different mammalian milks, evolutionary genomics of the casein gene cluster in Narwhal, and the imaginary phylogeny of unicorns! Want to join our Admin meetings as well? Signup to join us!

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, all public meetings have shifted to ONLINE-ONLY. Please sign in on Meetup to see the Zoom connection info.

This is a weekly zoom call hosted by the Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious communities, for anyone interested in reviewing the week's science and news on COVID-19. Plus guest stars monkeypox, Ebola, RSV and influenza. We welcome your questions and are happy to discuss any articles or news you may have found.