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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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"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 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/
Why pay when you can do it for free?
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.
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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
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.
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Unfortunately, this is a bit far from sequencing. All you're doing is taking the raw DNA and making it insoluble in water. So, really, it's a great way to make false snot... which should appeal to the young male sector more anyway. Gross is G00d
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.
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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.
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
Its not quite what it says on the story, its not DNA sequencing its just a DNA seperation kit using the bog standard ethanol prep which you can do with washing up liquid, salt and a bottle of (80%) Polish vodka. The electrophoresis step is quite nice using a battery to provide the DC current. However the kit is nothing you could not make yourself (Most of Molecular biology is really quite low tech the main requirement is getting pure reagents to do it with)
Thats not to say its not a cool gift/toy, at the very least the Centrifuge, and Electrophoresis chamber could probably be reused by the budding geekling
here is the link to the actual product.
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.
It's just gene mapping via electrophoresis, rather than sequencing. The stuff to do it crudely is actually pretty simple and cheap.
All it gets you is a pattern of sites that the enzymes cut at, not a sequence. Still, this is how a lot of DNA work (particularly forensics) is done, and it's awesome enough for me to want one (even though I have ready access to the real stuff).
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.
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>.
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
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...
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*
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.
You also get to do electrophoresis and take pictures of your product, which is kinda cool. I can just see what's going throuh those kids minds right now....So, how similar are fido and the cat? What if I compare little sister's DNA to mine? Hey, you hold down the dog while I get some blood....oops....
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
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."
No I'm a molecular biologist I mean 80% by volume (160 proof) anything much less won't precipitate the DNA. I'm in the UK and can buy 80% vodka from my local supermarket. (I plan to buy a bottle and use it when doing demos for the university open day .... granted I'll empty the bottle and use the lab ethanol, but the appearance that counts.)
A little Googling gives me a 160 proof spirit Polmos Polish Pure Spirit (about half way down the page). Technically it may not be a vodka, in my travels I read the a vodka has to be between 80 and 110 by proof (OTOH my brain cells will probably not make the distinction:-). I also came across references that booze above 140 proof was illegal to sell in the US
....to the age old question by all the kids that never fit in, and always wondered if they were really adopted.
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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!
I tell you what.. drop any farmer with some cows a quick note and you'll be able to find someone who has direct access to anthrax in no time..
It's not really a hugely deadly and/or rare find. It's pretty plain vanilla...