Category: DIY Equipment

The Aliqbot, a DIY Liquid Handling Robot

Published: October 17th, 2017   Last Modified: January 31st, 2018

Pipetting hundreds of tubes worth of reagent can be hard on your hands, and on your soul. In this video I try and make my life a bit easier by throwing together a DIY liquid handling robot in the cheapest/rickety-est method possible.

This is part 1 of a multi-part series where I make this beasty do my bidding. As I mention in the video the hardest part of a liquid handling robot is not the mechanics, but the programming and control. Pt. 2 will cover expanding this concept further.

I got in touch with the people at Opentrons (https://opentrons.com/) to see if I can get their software running on my machine, which they are willing to do, yay! From what I can gather from their github page that they are running their bot from a smoothieboard of some sort, which is a very capable motion controller.

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Helios gene gun teardown and comparison to DIY model (video)

Published: September 6th, 2017   Last Modified: September 7th, 2017

For a long, long time I had lusted after the Helios gene gun. It was, as far as I was concerned, the top of the line method of bombarding your cells. Not that there was much competition, Bio-rad for the longest time was (and arguably still is) the only legit manufacturer of gene guns. At a hefty 30,000$ it’s not a piece of equipment you buy on a lark. So quite a bit of time and effort was spent in creating a DIY alternative with reasonable success.

Once in a while, though, fortune smiles upon a humble potato farmer like myself. A very generous donor actually gave me a Helios gene gun, new in box, unopened! Thank you!!! Following the teaching of our patron saint, Dave Jones, what’s the first thing I did? Turn it on? NO. TAKE IT APART!

What follows is a look at the internals of the Helios gene gun and my thoughts on it’s construction. As well, I compare it to my gene gun, which is in it’s Mk.II revision, to see just how well my gear stacks up against the pros. Lets go!

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Take a look at my gene gun! (Video at end of post)

Published: May 23rd, 2017   Last Modified: June 20th, 2018

At some point during your adventures you will find yourself having to deliver a payload of DNA/RNA into your organism of interest, usually through chemical means or by piggybacking on another organism. But what if, for whatever reason, you can’t use either method? Why not deliver your DNA coated onto gold/tungsten particles DIRECTLY INTO THE NUCLEUS at high speed through a gene gun!

Now, commercial gene guns are sold and manufactured by BioRad. However, the price tag of 10-30,000$ depending on the model is prohibitive for those who want to dip their toes into particle bombardment. How about doing it DIY style, safely, for less than 1000$ all in?

Continue reading “Take a look at my gene gun! (Video at end of post)”

CNCd Electrophoresis Gear : The Reckoning

Published: March 19th, 2017   Last Modified: June 16th, 2017

In this video I talk about how you can apply technologies like CNC routers to do your bidding, in this case to make very professional looking electrophoresis gear. I’ve included the Fusion 360 files to make your own, click the “Continue Reading” button after the embedded video.

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Make a Solid State Cooling Block for 50 bucks

Published: May 13th, 2016   Last Modified: May 7th, 2018

Occasionally you need to do an enzymatic reaction at temperatures lower than ambient, and some of those times you need to do it in reasonable volumes. Your thermocycler is being used by some plucky graduate student, and it wouldn’t fit anyway in those wee little cups for PCR tubes. What to do? Shell out 1000-2000$ for something commercial that you’re only going to use occasionally? NAHHHHH!!!! Whip up your own with parts bought off ebay and stuff you have lying around! 50 bucks or less, easy.

Specs? You can select a temperature and it can cool down to -2.0C in 10 minutes or less, good enough. Hindsight will appear as a theme in this write up, because I didn’t take pictures as I built the thing, so the only reasonable option was to take pictures while tearing it apart. You can pretend I’m building it by starting at the bottom. Worked well for a while, but a few critical oversights made the performance deteriorate, and there’s always time to do it right the second time.

This is a teardown of one of my prototypes. I won’t go into the wiring or the electric theory too deep, you can figure it out pretty easily by looking it up online, and half the fun is trying it yourself and screwing up, alot. Continue reading “Make a Solid State Cooling Block for 50 bucks”