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Through a very nice discussion with Maarten de Smit, we came up with additional approaches to replace laboratory-grade material with widely available alternatives in our quest for kitchen-grade DNA transformation. The results include marmite, red wine and Indonesian pudding.

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On the quest to try to replicate the DNA transformation process in a kitchen-like environment, one of the obstacles is to create competent cells. These cells are degraded in a way that the alien DNA plasmid can flow into them, thus allowing the DNA transformation itself.

Maarten de Smit just wrote me that there’s a way this can happen in a natural setting, by using water that is high on Calcium, according to [Baur]. Imagine – DNA transformation in a bottle of still mineral water 🙂

Or would you prefer sparkling?

On April 25th, on Jennifer Willet’s BioArt course I’ll be holding one of the classes, where we’ll perform the pGLO experiment based on the corresponding BIO-RAD kit. We also came up with the idea of trying to perform the same DNA transformation but instead of using lab-grade materials, we’d only utilize commercially available off-the-shelf tools.

Looking at the pGLO transformation manual (download the complete manual and the quick-guide from here, need to register first, which is free), we need to find kitchen-grade equivalents for the following tools, that are not included in the BIO-RAD kit:

• a way to create a precisely 42 °C water bath
• a way to create a 37 °C incubator (but this is actually not that important)
• micro-wave oven – well, this is easy

The following are included in the kit, but it would be nice if we could come up with a protocol that do not need these materials, but can be replaced with commercially available stuff:

• sterile pipets, with a resolution of 100μl and 250μl
• sterile innoculation loops
• sterile small test tubes
• sterile plates
• sterile water or sterile solution of CaCl₂

My gut feeling is that the above list is available in a regular pharmacy, one way or another. What seems to be really hard to get are:

• pGLO DNA plasmid
• competent E.Coli bacteria
• LB nutrient agar