Making DNA Sequencing More Accessible
A spotlight on Biotinkering Berlin, a Mozilla mini-grant recipient
DNA sequencing may seem like a task best left to professionals: PhDs in lab coats, tucked away in research facilities with expensive equipment.
But what if anyone with an internet connection and bit of curiosity could parse DNA? That’s the goal of Lisa Thalheim, a Berlin-based citizen scientist, and Biotinkering Berlin, a biweekly biotech meetup. Biotinkering Berlin recently received from Mozilla an Open Science Mini-Grant: $3,933 in funding, made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Further reading:
Seeking Projects at the Intersection of Openness and Science
Thalheim has dual interests in computer science and biological science. She focused on the former in school, and developed an interest in the latter after her studies. She’s also a proponent of the DIY movement.
“In the last few years, I’ve been engaged in getting biology and biotechnology outside of professional settings like academia or industry, and bringing it to ordinary people,” Thalheim explained in a recent interview. “It’s such an important and amazing field with a lot happening right now that should be available to a wider audience.”
She continues: “Biotinkering Berlin is building open lab hardware like thermocyclers and other amateur stuff, because it is so very very expensive to buy. But you can build it for yourself with all the documentation on the Internet, such as Creative Commons licenses.”
Thalheim’s latest project focuses on making DNA sequencing more accessible. Essentially, taking any organism in your environment and determining the order of its four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. “This technology has become kind of accessible to amateurs in the last few years,” Thalheim says. “But there’s still a lot of work needed to make it more accessible outside of the research lab.”
She’s currently doing that work. Biotinkering Berlin provides a crash-course in DNA sequencing. At first, Thalheim was worried participants would feel lost, or struggle to find real-world applications. But she was quickly put at ease.
“There was a suggestion of sequencing wild bees, because bees are so important for food chains,” she recalls. “Another [participant] had a community garden and there was something living in the soil that kept killing nightshade plants. She wanted to know what it was, try some remedies, and then use sequencing to assess whether her interventions had worked.”
The quest for more open science isn’t easy. Thalheim and Biotinkering Berlin have encountered hurdles, like gaining access to reagents, a substance used in chemical analyses. “At this point, the companies are still not really set up to deal with people who don’t have a professional background in science,” she explains.
But Thalheim isn’t easily discouraged, either. For Biotinkering Berlin, many more workshops are on the horizon. And, the group will be posting materials online, so others can follow their lead. “There’s going to be lots of people running around Berlin who have actually done DNA sequencing before,” Thalheim says.
If you’d like to learn more, you can read Lisa’s full interview about her project. If you’d like to get involved, you can reach Lisa on her Twitter feed or through the GitHub repository for her project.
