DIY Bio Houston Talk at TxRx Labs

Yesterday, was the first quasi-meeting of DIY Bio Houston and I think it went pretty well. I scheduled it for 6 which may have been too early for those with day jobs. I started my presentation(attached) at 7 and would have probably finished in 30 seconds I was soo nervous but luckily people were interested and asked alot of questions. After the presentation, Meredith Pattersontalked a bit about the amazing things she’s doing with Lactobacillus. Then Forrest went into a very detailed explanation of How to create a luciferase enhanced “Fire” Bunny. Then everyone broke to work on individual projects.

This may or may not be what Forrests Himalayan Fire Rabbit looks like

Things I learned for future talks:

Be Prepared: If you are nervous about public speaking, maybe you should rehearse the talk more than once.
Advertise better: We’ve got 5 universities nearby and most of the attendees last night were members of the Lab
Schedule the event well in advance: Not every DIY Bioer is a student with few responsibilities
Take advantage of people’s experience: If you have someone in the audience who knows more, see if they’d like to share their experience.
Projects, Projects, Projects: Some people like the academic side of Biology but others are more interested in the hands on side, so it’ll be a good idea to organize a small build for them.

SUPER INTERESTED IN DIY BIO? DONT KNOW WHERE TO GO? Keep Reading.

If you are located in houston and interested in DIY Bio, feel free to email me @kingjacob “at” gmail.com. Or stay tuned via twitter(#diybiohou).

Link Dump Prepared for the Presentation: Feel free to add on in the comments.

Organizations
http://Diybio.org
http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/ Mailing List
http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Main_Page Open Bioinformatics Foundation
http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page IGEM

Suppliers
http://neb.com good prices/ nice catolog/ currently running a promotion
http://www.carolina.com/ one off Bio kits
http://pearlbiotech.com Opensourced Gelbox
http://mrgene.com/ Genesynthesis
http://gingobioworks.com Biobrick assembly kits and services

Databases
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Anydata from any project that’s received public funding is here. Genes, proteins, etc.
http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page Registry of all current standard biological parts
http://www.mendeley.com/ research paper social network

Software
http://biopython.org
http://bioperl.org
http://biojava.org
http://biolib.open-bio.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://nebc.nox.ac.uk/tools/bio-linux/bio-linux-5.0 Dedicated bioinformatics LInux Install
http://www.dnalinux.com/ Virtual Linux install
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Computational_Tools Good compilation of Bioinformatics software

DIY related blogs
http://88proof.com/synthetic_biology/blog/ Jonathon Clines Blog
http://diybionyc.blogspot.com/ DIY Bio New York City’s Blog
http://homebiology.blogspot.com/ Wonderful blog by a mother homeschooling biology
http://diybio4beginners.blogspot.com/ diy bio for beginners, posts a lot of good videos
http://citsci.blogspot.com/ Making a Lab on the cheap
http://blog.ginkgobioworks.com/ gingobioworks blog
http://www.synthesis.cc/ Rob carlsons blog
http://my.biotechlife.net/ Ricardo Vidal, co-founder of the DNA Network
http://thegenesherpa.blogspot.com/ Dr. Murphy, on medical genetics.
http://hackteria.org