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Home DNA Sequencing
An anonymous reader writes "Wired is running an article about high-tech gifts for Christmas, including a home DNA sequencing kit targeted at kids for under $100. What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?"
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This kit will install Claria spyware in your genetic code.
"What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?"
Man, I hope not: those Fisher Price kids are genetic disasters. Most of them are bald, have some type of head enlarging disorder, as well as lack of arms and legs. I've even seen one with a pan on his head.
Now Weebles: there's your evolutionary high road...
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I had no idea this kind of technology was even near any kind of consumer level. It's amazing the rate technology is progressing.
~S
I don't mean producing laboratory quality results, just whether it works at all to produce something recognizable? This would be sort of a fun gift for my girlfriend, who is in biotech.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
when I get here early and have to RTFA instead of the posts
Why pay when you can do it for free?
So stop voting for the neo-cons then. They've taken over the Republican party.
Now, your kids can check if you are their real father for themselves.
I think a lot of kids wil be very happy with this information.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
until little jamie finds out that he and daddy share no genetic material, before this gets released, let me buy shares in the paper divorce orders are printed on ...
;)
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
So, this kit extracts some DNA, purifies it and runs it out on some kind of gel, then stains it. DNA sequencing my ass. Still, it's pretty neat - though I wouldn't want any kid of mine fiddling around with DNA dyes, most of them are nasty stuff.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Mommy's Little Mouthpiece Teddy Ruxpin goes wireless. Plug Wabi's transmitter into a phone jack, call a designated toll-free number, and record a message. At selected intervals, the transmitter collects the data and sends it to the ursine bot's receiver over a 900-MHz signal. The bear giggles when it gets a message, and your kid simply presses its badge to play the audio. "Hi, Billy! Mommy and Daddy don't love you anymore. I'm in charge now, and things are going to change around this house, dammit!"
Great. Now we can give them Chucky Doll for present.
If only i had something like that when my little sister annoyed me.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
I think these toys definitely have *some* educational value.
It sure beats trying to put the wshing-mchine sized behemoths a lot of labs use for this application under the christmas tree... and those things can rock themselves across the room. Just imagine Junior getting caught between that and the wall.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
Don't try this at home kids -- try this at someone else's home!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I am curious how powerful the centrifuge is in this thing. My mom worked in a med-lab and they had centrifuge repair guys on call in case one started to make funny noises. Unstable high RPM systems of blood and glass can get a little nasty.
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
DNA Sequencing ? As Homer Simpson would put it, "Boring !" I mean, "see kid, this barcode is different from this barcode, this is a black bean DNA and this is a green pea DNA", "dad, can't I go back to my playstation ?".
But, hey, I would like to play with them Pixel Blocks myself ! (from the same wired review).
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
"Luke, I'm NOT your father after all"
"NOOOOOOOOOO" *cries like a girl*
Will code a sig generator for food
Could any biochemists comment on the likely limitations of this kit? Ok, obviously it's a toy, but what limitations look like they've been placed on this thing? I know we're all making jokes about 'Daddy's not junior's father' but sadly :) I can't see this thing having the resolution to provide that much information.
Obviously it won't have the more dangerous chemicals mentioned previously, and sample purity would be a bit of a joke, but I'm curious as to how well, if at all, this thing would work, and how?
-- INTX Grouch. http://www.midnightblue.net
It would seem that products like this one (or maybe slightly more professional versions) would eventually support distributed human genome sequencing efforts by individuals. More data on the DNA sequences of more people would help scientists, biomed, and pharma types understand the genetic variability of people.
I guess the next frontier is Sequencing@Home with people bragging about how many of their own base pairs or chromosomes they have sequenced.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This is a great way to show kids how DNA tests work. I'm all for anything that would help de-mystify DNA testing in the minds of the public. It's particularly gratifying to see that they'll discover it's ultimately a human being making a judgement call about what he or she sees with a microscope.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Finally I can find that elusive gene for intimate knowlegde of d&d ver 3.5...
Now all I need is the gene for big breasts, blond hair and low standards, and I might end up with the perfect wife after all.
Well it will never give you a full dna report as you need to do more than just a simple gell. I am curious as to what the enzymes are. My guess is that they are specific for certain base patterns and cut the DNA into smaller pieces. (Alternatives they could be peptiases and just eat up the protein from the peas) The smaller pieces will transverse the gell faster than the larger pieces. So while the experiment will detect DNA all it will be able to report on is how many pieces of DNA you can create with the enzymes. Of course, if you do not know the enzyme, even this info will be useless.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?
No not Fisher Price... Fisher priced.
Just bet you never thought Elroy Jetson would beat out Star Wars, first robots sweeping the carpet (ala Rosie) and now REAL SCIENCE PROJECTS!!!!!!!
Next comes the ejection-bed alarm system!
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Quite simply there is no sequencing ocurring. It's merely separation of DNA molecules. This will just tell you their size. There's not sufficient information in the article or the store blurb for me to figure out if restriction enzymes are being included, which would make things slightly more interesting. In the days before PCR and DNA sequencing was as easy as it is now, genetic tests were done via Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms, so your DNA would break up into differently sized bits depending on which sequence was present at a cutting site.
I took a little time to read the description of the kit on Discovery's website. It's much less than the /. post suggested. There's just some chemicals and a toy centrifuge to extract DNA. Actually there are ways to extract DNA with household chemicals, precipitate with isopropanol and spool on a glass or plastic rod.
So far it's only DNA extraction, cool as a science-for-fun thing, but nothing new.
The analysis part (with electrophoresis) seems to be fake (simulated, if you wish). The kit, according to the Discovery website contains
"DNA stain (fabricated to mimic real DNA)".
So, it's just a toy, cool, but nothing that'll allow Junior to test his paternity or do any real DNA analysis. There are educational kits that provide real DNA analysis in a classroom environment (like the Biotechnology Explorer program from BioRad), but they still require teacher's supervision.
You have to be careful however. Last night I downloaded and cloned Madonna, but she just stood there screaming "What the hell do you think you're doing?". It turns out that companies post fake DNA to flood the network. Bummer! It was such a pain disassembling the clone afterwards too.
Sorry, the poster and Wired got it wrong. The original source calls this a gene mapper. That probably means it includes restriction enzymes for cutting the DNA into chuncks. This is not the same as finding the primary sequence. Sequencing by all current common methods requires either radioactivity or a fluorescent laser detection device. Neither of which is likely to be provided for $80. (Or I'd buy it for my lab!!)
It doesn't work that way. In order for such results to be admissible in court, a chain of custody of the evidence has to be established. What this basically comes down to is that a medical profesional has to swear an affidavit that they collected the samples, sealed them and ensured that they went to the lab without any possibility of any of the parties in the case being able to tamper with them.
I took a home paternity test last year, which came out negative. If it had been positive, the mother would still have had no legal grounds for getting child support from me. It would have been necessary (from a legal point of view) for a properly supervised test to have been performed.
(Mind you, if he had been my child, I wouldn't have been such an absolute bastard as to turn my back on my responsibilities. The mother herself suggested that we carry out the test. And she is a lawyer.)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
I think you might mean 80 proof vodka-- 80% would be 160 proof. I didn't see any 160 proof booze when I was there, and I highly suspect even if they made it they'd have a hard time importing it into the US (where I happen to be).
I was hanging out with Polish folks too, and I don't think they were holding out on me.
Actually this remainds me of Chinas "Great Leap Forward" when Mao thought it would be a great idea to have people produce steel in their backyards. Needless to say the little steel produced was useless and lot of time and resources were waisted.
--
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
after they bought Microsoft, anything is possible...
This Like That - fun with words!
What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?
...
No, its the biotech killer app that will start a civil war in 10-15% (average region dependent) of all households on the planet
Over the counter, at your local drugstore, genetic paternity tests.......
Whoever markets the first reliable one will be richer than Bill Gates.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
That's one more thing to add to my list of 'stuff-that-scifi-authors-said-we-would-have-by-20 10'.
:)
Fix your eyes with friggin' lasers.
Communications the size of a pack of smokes (cell phones)
Bluetooth
The Internet
Video Conferencing (and even Video Telephones)
Terrorists with WMDs
Robot that vaccuums
and now...Toys for Sequencing DNA for Junior. Heinlein et al would be proud
Still waiting for flying (or automatic/autopilot) cars, permanent station on Moon/Mars (I'll accept either), Cancer/Common-cold cure (I'll accept either), humanoid robot for menial tasks around the house, acceptable voice control/communications in conjunction with useful AI computing...etc...
Obviously no biochemists were involved if they call it "sequencing"
Hope they are smart enough to make the gel first and not include the ingredients for the litle ones
Search for polyacrylimide gel electrophoresis preperation to see what I mean, cause thats all this is
over atx ?language=en-GB&product=DNATIN&category=LIFE
www.iwoot.com
you can get a different but more professional dna in a tin kit
http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/ProductDetails.asp
its not DIY though, its a mail in DNA kit
*resistance is futile, or fuzzy, i dunno*
High school kids have been doing DNA projects in science fairs for a decade now as the technology trickles down. You dont even need access to a scientist's relative lab anymore.
Right on, there would be likely nothing but a smear, even cutting it up would result in a smear because the huge number of overlapping fragments, but the kit includes DNA stain -- fabricated to mimic real DNA -- so I am guessing you will always get the same pattern. I suppose you could run it out on the gel, take a sample from the lane, and run that out in a lower %age agarose gel to separate things out.
However, this is a crude extract with no purification or isolation. Fingerprinting this kind of prep is worthless to answer questions other than is there nucleic acids in the sample unless they are including some sort of probe (highly unlikely). Fingerprinting entire genomes of multichromosomal organisms would not be something worth doing (beyond the gee-whiz factor) unless you move into doing blots, or if you worked with entities with single chromosomes such as bacteria or mitochondrial DNA. They include lambda DNA, maybe that let's them do a fingerprint, maybe with a double digest to do some mapping.
Given the fact that it appears that the DNA stain seems to be responsible for the pattern seen- the good news for parents fearful that Jane or Johnny might discover something about her/his parentage, everyone in the world will look like they have identical patterns- unless the kid is smart enough to figure out that it might mean the parents might be a little too closely related.
of some kit one of my teachers always told about
:\
one could get it on the internet (hoax or truth? no clue)
it was called 'be your own god' and contained all kinds of materials to clone genes for bacterial toxins and stuff. anthrax a go-go
anyways i suspect that, if it ever was available, it won't be now, given the whole 9-11 situation and the anthrax scares and all...
Yeah, there was a legal case not too long ago involving a woman who required a blood transfusion for her surgery. She told the doctor that she didn't want blood from anyone but an immediate relative. The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV.
Patients have the right to limit the scope of their consent, so the woman won her case against the doctor. But no hospital would have placed the burden of blood identification on the immediate family because of related privacy issues. The ruling was that the woman should have had an the blood drawn from herself in advance of the surgery.
I thought that was a very insightful case. Hospitals are probably the last institution that really serve to protect your privacy. They're hardline ideologues on all kinds of things. Hell, the local hospital isn't even allowed to put up any images of Santa because it's a "religious icon." No star-topped Christmas trees either.
Statistically 3-4/10 children's fathers are not their biologically fathers... Next time my kid gets a cut I wouldn't mind running a few tests. :)
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Nucleases. Peptideases cut proteins which can be visualized on SDS gels, not TBE gels.
That Paris Hilton is one hot retard.
yay :-D
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Sorry got sloppy there at the end. I mentioned the peptidases to eat up everything else so that the "DNA" extract would be somewhat pure and then segued into dna cutting without changing enzymes.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
....to the age old question by all the kids that never fit in, and always wondered if they were really adopted.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
What do you say when you drive your motor car to the local filling establishment, "You there, fill my tank with petroleum distillate and revulcanise my tires"?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Non-Geeks have been performing stochastic DNA recombination for hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years. It seems that the secret ingredient is...a girlfriend!
When my wife and I have kids, we're planning to get the children and ourselves DNA fingerprinted and put the images together in a picture frame for comparison.
Of course, I have no idea how accessible such services are, how expensive, or even what the process is called... still I think it'll look neat on the wall.
Some would claim that creating clones with the Fisher-Price Clone Kit is nothing more than "Child's Play," wereas serious people (like William Tenn) would prefer a serious kit.
Remember, kids, only Build-a-Man can build a man!
Yeah, right.
shouldn't we make sure our kids speak english and read before doing something like this? if you're going to try to make children understand science, let them experiement with baking soda and vinegar like we did when i was a kid!
this new generation is going to boast the highest frequency of unethical children's toys ever. are we really proud of this?
on that toy page, I saw this memory from
my childhood.
Driving with levers was fun.
Anyone else remember this.
Cause the only one to lose in that scenario is her. Any alterior motives on your part? :)
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
You weren't hanging out with the right Poles.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It's one of those common ones people get wrong all the time, so I thought I'd point it out to the world. Nothin' personal, y'understand.
While, I don't want it on my fingers that directly would not hurt you like an acid, but if it were to get into your system through absorption through the skin or, more likely, ingestion, it intercalates (wedges itself into) the double helix of the DNA strand. That is useful because ethidium bromide (etbr) fluoresces making it possible to visualize the bands of DNA being separated. It is bad for living systems because it can interfere with DNA replication causing mutations (thus it's designation as a mutagen) that could increase the likelihood of cancer, birth defects, etc.
The doctor laughed her off and used conventional blood, and the woman got infected with HIV
Can you provide some documentation for this anecdote? In the United States, the blood supply has been screened for HIV since 1985 and I assume all other 1st world countries have done the same. The risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion is about 1 in 90,000. With 4,000,000 transfusion recipients a year, there have probably been fewer than 1000 cases of HIV contracted through blood transfusions in the United States in the past 18 years.
~Philllip
Listen to an adaption on Seeing Ear Theatre.
LOL!!! True. After watching The Simple Life, I wouldn't expect any less of her, tho.
I would still prefer to give my closest 'friends,' an Albert for Christmas.
Hey look mum! I DNA sequenced Cowboyneal
I couldn't think of a sig.
Soon, no one will need home remedies for acne or headaches. Instead they can just sequence their DNA, fix any problems, and be done with it.
Well, that explains how I lost my moderator privs all that time ago.
Watch your toothbrush: Frankenstein may figure out who Daddy really is (or isn't).
LOL! Fact is, numerous genetic studies have shown that a huge proportion of families include at least one child whose father isn't actually who he is supposed to be. The mind boggles: you'd think Dad could figure out he was being taken for a ride but apparently people are capable of fantastic acts of self deception.
These "toy" kits are likely to result in a significant increase in the divorce rate. You mark my words!