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0 pointskoeng5y ago0 comments

I’m trying to figure out how to ship DNA effectively. It’s really inefficient right now, so I’m genetically engineering bacterial spores to make it a lot better. Not sure if people will adopt, but at least it’ll be 10x better than what is currently available!

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4 comments · 1 top-level

webmaven5y ago· 3 in thread

Hopefully the spores are non-viable in some way (sterile, require an exotic growth medium, terminator genes, etc.)?

koengOP5y ago

They won’t be. I definitely thought deeply about that aspect, but am choosing to not make them non-viable for the following reasons:

1. Payloads are in domesticated strains, which are less efficient than wild strains, which are already global

2. Exotic growth media requirements make the cells only for wealthy organizations, which is status quo and aren’t target audience

Of course, if good reason comes to change that, I would.

Exotic in this case just means uncommon or rare in the wild, not expensive. Something like requiring both salt and aspartame would help prevent gene transfer in the wild (to related or unrelated strains) as well as making it unlikely to grow on its own.

koengOP5y ago

I would love to have something like that, but unfortunately that’s a really hard problem in itself, so I’d likely only start working on it once the need arises

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