Team Snail is Go!
Wednesday 22nd June saw this month’s meeting of the DIYBio group. Because there’s so much different stuff happening in the group these days, we decided it would be good to concentrate people’s efforts on things they were most interested in. So ‘team co-ordinators’ volunteered to lead teams to work on specific projects that we’ve come up with.
Team Kit will be developing home made versions of the lab equipment that is used for DNA fingerprinting. The plan is to compare them to the professional versions, and perhaps use them to do some exciting experiments!
Team Microbe are continuing the work started by the whole group on the Manchester Microbe Map. The data is all in, but needs to be analysed and visualised so that it can be read easily in a way that tells us something interesting.
The major excitement of the evening came with the arrival of the DIYBio snails, to be managed by Team Snail! We were kindly donated some tanks, and the pet shop were only too happy to give us snails – they get rid of them as they are pests. They had only just cleaned out the tanks so we only got a few, but our ‘Queen of Snails’ will go back and get some more over the next few weeks.
The plan is to let the snails breed until we have a decent sized starter population, and then begin a selection experiment. The darkest or lightest snails (the selection criteria hasn’t been completely decided yet) will be removed to the second tank, and then over the weeks the snails that are ‘voted out’ will be removed to the non-selective tank. Hopefully, our selection tank snails will start to show a visible difference in the direction we’re selecting for.
Keep an eye out for SnailCam to see the experiments progress! You can also follow them on @TeamSnailMCR.
We ended the meeting with a discussion of E.coli and other microbes, inspired by the recent outbreak of a nasty strain in Germany, talking about how this ‘underappreciated organism’ is useful in all sorts of areas and only becomes a problem if it turns up in the wrong place or gains the ability to produce toxins. For a full write up of the discussion, see the mailing list.
If you want to get involved in any of these projects, or take part discussions and suggest new topics, join the mailing list and come to next month’s meeting! —-
DIYBIO June 22nd meeting
DIYbio June meeting
Location: MadLab
Description: Open to all, get involved in some do-it-yourself biology experiments!
Date: 22-07-2011
Start Time: 19:00
End Time: 21:00
This month we’ll be having a joint session with HACman, to pick their brains on building homemade equipment for doing DNA analysis. We’ll also be having a discussion on the recent E-coli outbreak in Europe. What does this tell us about bacterial sex and how microorganisms make us ill?
Work will also be continuing on ongoing projects such as analysing the Manchester Microbe Map, and setting up new ones: do you fancy doing some snail breeding?
How we got the Go Ahead for the Microbe Map
Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the planning meeting in April where the details of the Microbe Map were hashed out*. However one question which I’m told was discussed in detail was the ethics of the experiment, and how we should plan the work to make sure we weren’t taking any risks (to ourselves or anyone else) and to avoid potential minefields. An important part of this was getting permission to swab the items that formed part of the map: although the original plan was to sample bank ATMs in the city, it occurred to us that despite the fact these are publically accessible, they actually belong to the banks – who might worry about what the results show. Even if we weren’t specifically going to be drawing any such conclusions, “Bank X has the most germs!” was a headline they would not want to see in the Metro! (more…)
DIYBIO SwabFest Review
This week was the third meeting of the Manchester DIY Bio group – the breeding ground for citizen biology. In previous meetings we had planned a starter project to explore the microbes of Manchester, and now was the time to metaphorically get our hands dirty.
Firstly though, we got to see how literally dirty our hands were with the results of the last meeting’s experiments, where we’d put our hands in agar jelly, and swabbed various surfaces around MadLab. The petri-dishes, which had been stored at room temperature for four days to allow the microbes to grow, were spread across the table and we all examined the cultures growing within. There was quite a range of stuff growing. Jo assured us that everything was harmless (she also, worryingly, kept referring to the microbes as ‘beautiful’ – I guess that’s scientists for you!). Most of them also looked reassuringly benevolent, apart from Asa’s hand-print, which had some kind of spores growing in it which looked decidedly sinister.
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SwabFest the Movie
Hey Swabbers! It was a warmish sunny day on the 4th of May 2011 when the DIYBIOMCR ‘citizen scientists’ went out sampling Manchester.
DIY Bio MCR Swab Fest from Prohyena on Vimeo.
May 18th – DIYbio SwabFest Results
Location: MadLab
Description: Come along to help us analyse the Manchester DIYbio ‘Microbe Map’ data gathered on Wednesday 4th of May, and help us build the Manchester Microbe Map!
Date: 18-05-2012
Start Time: 19:00
End Time: 21:00