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This was published couple of years ago by Gibson and Venter. You can even buy a kit from New England Biolobas (very fine company I must say). What the software does is to save you little effort in writing the perl/python scripts for automating the design. I wouldn't call this a big hurdle for the would be terrorists.

DNA is helix of pairs of amino acids stacked together. Each amino acid consists of no more than a dozen atoms. Pairs of amino acids bind together in peptide bonds releasing water. Each amino acid is no more than a dozen atoms. So a single strand of DNA is maybe 20 atoms wide. Depending on the way you represent them, they are like little miniature Feynmann diagrams. Chemical structure.

Amino Acid Chart.

Once they start weaving and interlocking these strands into larger structures like steel cable assemblies, then you'll have your space elevator.

Turns out a lot of the coolest results in synthetic biology have been produced by teams of college students for less than $1500. See the iGEM competition http://2010.igem.org/ (and follow links to older competitions), order some biobricks from New England Biolabs http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE0546.asp , and check out the tutorials at http://syntheticbiology.org/ It's all open source, too. The price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis are both dropping exponentially. It's a lot like the Homebrew Computer Club times in molecular biology right now...

No way in hell anyone who hasn't had massive experience with PCR is going to get results from a DIY PCR...PCR protocols, although simple, are incredibly touchy and take a lot of time to get consistent results from.

I have to disagree with you here, at least for checking a specific, limited set of loci. IAAMB (molecular biologist) but I don't have "massive" experience with PCR and yet I've never had trouble getting it to work by following standard protocols using quality reagents (e.g. from NEB) and primers (from IDT). As long as the DIY guide included directions to use IDT's software to assist them in choosing primers and to determine the annealing temperature to use during the PCR cycle, I don't see why your typical DIYer with access to some old lab equipment wouldn't be able to get it to work as long as the DNA prep was good.

I would imagine a limiting factor to this approach would be the cost of the necessary equipment, with thermocyclers running in the thousands of dollars.

Ah, I used to work on this sort of stuff. Although TFA is very information poor, I'm guessing that this research was done by Angela Belcher's group. She and a few other folks (including my former prof) have been working with proteins that bind to specific organic surfaces for several years now. She's been at the lead of this particular field for quite a while now. It's a very interesting and promising field of research.

Here's some background for the interested:

M13 is a filamentous bacteriophage. It infect E. coli bacteria and creates a latent infection where the E. coli ends up pumping out hundreds of new M13. Unlike most bacteriophage, the infection is not lethal to the host. The M13 phage itself is thread-like in structure. At the core is the a circular, single-stranded DNA genome arranged in a linear shape. (imagine grabbing a rubber band at both ends and stretching it out so that it's a very elongated and narrow oval) There are 5 types of coat proteins that then coat and protect this DNA. Here's a link to a decent site about M13: http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~mgonzalez/Micro5 21/Lambda/M13.html

One, G8P, is present in thousands of copies and coats the DNA in a spiral fashion. A pipe cleaner is a fairly good representation of what the phage looks like. At the ends, the other 4 types of proteins form end caps. On the end that infects bacteria, a protein known as G3P is present in 5 copies and mediates the atachment of the virus and its incorporation into the bacterium for infection. G3P is important because it's fairly exposed at the end of the virus. Also, experimentation over the years has found a 'permissive' region in G3P. A permissive region of the protein structure that is tolerant to the addition of new amino acid sequences that do not badly disrupt the normal protein function. Therefore, one can genetically engineer M13 to put a small chunk of new protein into this site and the virus is still capable of infecting bacteria and replicating. The inserted bit of protein is also known to be exposed at the end of the virus.

M13 is available in commercially generated libraries where tens of millions of randonly generated DNA sequences have been inserted into M13. These 'libraries' are then infected into bacteria and amplified. The resulting phage are then sold to researchers who want to find pecific protein sequences that bind to certain targets. Mostly, these targets are biological in nature. For example - to try and find peptide-based drugs that bind to and inactivate a particular cellular receptor. Here is a link to a commonly used commercial library (I used to use it and I know Belcher's group did too) http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/products/productE8120. asp The link also has lots of pretty pictures and the like about how phage display screening works in more detail that I've got below.

Essentially, what you do is take a substrate of interest, in this case, cobalt oxide and mix it with a sample of the library. You use incubation conditions where regular M13 doesn't stick to the CoO. If any of the library phage stick you know it is probably because those particular phage have a protein insert which binds specifically to CoO. You do a few rounds of binding and washing to get the strongest binders and then sequence the cobalt oxide binding proteins you've recovered.

You can churn out hundreds of sequences this way and start building up a library of proteins very specific to a particular inorganic substrate. You can, for example, create proteins that bind to only platinum versus gold and palladium, cupric oxide versus cuprous oxide, etc. There is even evidence that you can discriminate various sizes of nanoparticles and bind to particular crystalline faces of materials this way. I even heard a rumor a few years back of being able to distinguish p and n-doped

I am not sure why simply because it is about one of many available tools, the post is out of place on Slashdot. I am not a member of a huge biochem or medical lab, but I am trying to learn and use biochemistry, so I can use every bit of help.

It's out of place because the announcement is somewhat akin to posting a front page article when some guy releases version 0.1 of a new text editor onto Sourceforge. It's been done a million times before, and it doesn't cover any new ground. It isn't even interesting to people who don't use text editors.

That said, if you're really trying to get a handle on biochem and molecular biology (and the bioinformatics that goes along with it), almost all up to date textbooks on the subject include a section (or more) on bioinformatics. In 2006, knowing how to perform basic analysis on your DNA or protein sequence is just about as important as understanding the concept of a gene, or how the complementary nature of DNA works. If the textbooks you currently have are a little out of date, take a look around the library and grab something more recent. There are also plenty of bioinformatics and sequence analysis textbooks on the shelves now.

If you're looking for some places to get started, (and I think someone has already mentioned these), try ExPASy . Although it's more protein oriented, it has an extensive list of links to a very broad cross-section of bioinformatics and sequence analysis tools (along with some tutorials). Also take a look at NCBI, which not only has a range of important tools (like BLAST), but also PubMed. In a similar vein, also explore the EBI site which has another extensive set of tools and databases.

Since you ask, some of the stuff that I commonly use for bog-standard molecular biology tasks (in addition to the links above) includes PlasMapper (finds restriction sites and generates tasteful plasmid maps) and the New England Biolabs site which has some similar tools (NEBcutter, for example), but also handy information on all the restriction enzymes themselves.

If you're into writing bioinformatics applications yourself, start by looking at something like BioPerl. Just using Perl as an example (since it's very popular in biology), there are pre-existing libraries, all fully open sourced and Free(tm), which do things like reverse translation and interfacing with analysis tools like BLAST already.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone getting started in molecular biology will discover these kinds of sites very quickly. They're mentioned in the textbooks, they're easily found with Google, and they'll be revealed after a 2 minute conversation with anyone working in the field. That's what make this story so pointless. There's nothing new here. It's all been done before, and done 500 times before at that. Even outsiders from other sciences will discover this kind of stuff within a day or two if they're actually serious.

The specific virus that Venter et al synthesized is called Bacteriophage phiX174. They probably chose it because it has such a short genome.

In fact, it's genome is so short that at first it confused researchers. It's genome is shorter than it should be. That is, there are fewer codons in the genome than there are amino acids in the virus's proteins. Normally, there would need to be a 1:1 codon:amino-acid ratio.

This lead researchers to the amazing discovery that phiX174 contains "genes within genes" and "overlapping genes". (Link to Genetic Map of phiX174) In several instances, one gene is entirely contained within another gene. In another, there are two genes (A and A*) that overlap with "reading frames" that are off by one.

This discovery challenges notions of what a gene is. With this knowledge, you can't say that a gene is simply a particular region of DNA.

These overlapping genes also call attention to the improbability of the evolution of phiX174. Commonly when a genetic mutation occurs, one base changes. This could affect one amino-acid in the protein for which the gene codes. In phiX174's case, a single base mutation could change 2 amino-acids in 2 proteins. This means that the evolution of these proteins is interdependent. That two functional proteins evolved in this manner is absolutely extraordinary.

Of course, now that it has evolved that way, it gives phiX174 an advantage of genetic economy. It takes less energy to maintain and reproduce a shorter genome. So phiX174 gets more bang for it's genetic buck by overlapping genes in this way.

The only thing in your air bag should be the sodium azide and an igniter. The last thing you need in an accident is a bunch of loose capacitors and crap being blown into your face.

Actually, I would rather be hit in the face with a bunch of capacitors than aerosolized sodium azide, which is highly toxic by US definition, and is about as healthy as sodium cyanide powder. It is commonly used as a laboratory preservative since it can kill just about anything...

The NaN3 and ignitor are not actually in the air bag - they are in an inflater, with a filter so they don't end up in the air bag.