[Hplusroadmap] DNA replication visualization

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 08 February 2008, Dan Bolser wrote:
> One general comment about the wiki is that I think we should not try
> to compete with wikipedia. The most important thing is the road map

It most certainly should not compete with Wikipedia or any other general 
resource out there. But caching a few documents is fine -- I have been 
trying to add the topic within a certain point of view, that of 
biohacking, though have some more revisions to go through because of my 
lack of knowledge on the subjects.

> and topics directly linked to it that are specific to the central
> topic of the project (biohacking).

For the biohacking subset, I saw a neat video last night with Drew Endy:

1) Genetic engineering stuff
-- 1.1) PCR (DNA amplification) (fairly simple)
-- 1.2) Oligonucleotides (DNA synthesis - see 1989 review, next zip)
-- 1.3) Sequencing (see $0 genome project)
2) Synbio stuff
-- 2.1) Automated oligonucleotide synthesis (see POSAM[1])
-- 2.2) Standards
-- 2.3) Abstraction

The purposes of the biokit seem to squarely fall under #1 and #2.1. 
Ideally, we can provide enough information so that enthusiasts can do 
practical PCR runs, can synthesize oligonucleotides from scratch if 
they had to (or order from somebody else), and do sequencing as well, 
all while maintaining good cultures and safety. Then, the next part of 
the toolset is the automated DNA synthesizer -- there is already an 
open source project out there, but it seems to reside anonymously, 
perhaps we can work on writing some information as to how to build or 
use it, etc.

And as for the broader purposes of the roadmap, perhaps I can throw in a 
few pages here and there. But otherwise I think Sourceforge strongly 
frowns on such coupling practices. I'll double check. I am long overdue 
to describe more about the roadmap, so if anybody wants to bring up 
questions regarding it, that would be great.

> We should not get distracted writing articles on basic biology when
> perfectly good stuff abounds on the internet.

I agree. But putting it into perspective, even if this means one or two 
sentences after an external link, is very helpful.

- Bryan

[1] http://www.bioinformatics.org/pogo/
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/