r/SyntheticBiology

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

I’ve been researching MES — basically engineered microbes using electricity + CO₂ to produce chemicals, fuels, and materials — and the cost curve is getting interesting.

The big question: if MES can hit cost parity with traditional chemistry at mid-sized industrial scale, does this become a real manufacturing disruption instead of just another climate-tech science project?

Curious what people here think: is this viable industrial biotech, or another overhyped lab-to-market story?

The PipeLine

A few years ago, I discovered Zeyner through his videos on genetic editing.

My question is, Is there a group or something, where enthusiasts with home lab are trying to achieve in vivo genome editing?

I know that is dangerous, but the technology is new and there are always a few crazy people

So i have a plasmid with a T7RNAP expression cassette I want to clone into another plasmid. The donor plasmid has a lacI site both inside and outside the cassette I ultimately want to clone. So to get rid of that, I am doing a double digest > agarose > gel purification to exclude that unwanted lacI, leaving just the PORTION of the original plasmid that contains the T7RNAP cassette.

Once I PCR this portion of the original plasmid that contains the T7RNAP system (fragment of interest), do I need to use Dpnl to ensure the methylated DNA from the gel purification is not potentially carried over to down stream transformation? Thank you!

I've been tinkering in this space for a bit and the thing that always kills me is the literature grind. You find 30-40 recent papers on something like organoid vascularization or CRISPR circuits, spend days connecting the dots, and still end up with the same old ideas.

So I'm building a simple, no-BS Literature-to-Hypothesis tool just for folks like us. You give it a topic, it pulls recent stuff from PubMed and arXiv, synthesizes the key bits, and spits out 3-5 concrete, testable hypotheses with citations and rough protocol sketches. Goal is under 15 minutes so you can actually move forward instead of just reading.

It's super early and I'm doing this solo as a side project. No fancy sales deck, just something I wish existed.

If you're working on organoids, metabolic pathways, genetic circuits, or anything synbio and want to kick the tires on a free early version, reply here or shoot me a DM. First bunch of people get lifetime free access and can tell me what actually needs to work better.

Real question though: what's the part of staying current on papers that frustrates you the most right now? Time sink? Hard to spot the novel angles? Replication headaches?

Appreciate any thoughts and happy to share updates as I build it out.