boo!

 

Daria Dantseva, Ukrainian Biohacker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-M1hp6w2sc

Here's Daria Dantseva speaking at Biohack the Planet.  From her experiences, she has something of great importance to communicate with us about the crucial role biohacking can play in the 21st century. Bravo, Daria.

Good news today about malaria vaccines

 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66985273

Media for micropropagation

 Here's Sesan and Hector in the lab.  What are they doing?

They're making callus initiation media.  

Hector adjusts the pH of the media.  

Organisms each have a favorite pH that they thrive on. 

Rice seems to like their food (the media) a little acidic when we micro propagate. 

Later, the media will be autoclaved and the liquid will be poured into plates.  

Agar will solidify as the media cools.

Rice seed will be dropped on the plates to feast on the media, developing into embryos. Rice calluses form, which are clumps of rice cells that will then be bombarded with DNA coated particles using the gene gun.

Several kinds of media are used in stages as we go along.  

Callus initiation media is the first one. 

About a week after the rice seed is placed on the plate with this media, embryonic growth may start to be observed.  

How we make progress: volunteers!

 Do you know that everyone at project GRFT is a volunteer?

Meet Anthony, one of our diligent and hard working volunteers.

Anthony spent the summer taking courses in molecular biology and cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz.  Now he's back and helping out with our work every week.  

gene gun

When the button is pushed as shown in this photo, a measured burst of helium gas propels microparticles carrying DNA plasmid into the plant cells. The plant cells that take up the DNA are transformed to express a protein.  This method of getting DNA into plant cells is called particle bombardment.  This is one of project GRFT's two gene guns built by physicist David Johnson, PhD.

Quote from Greta Thunberg