1. www.biocurious.org
a hackerspace for biotech
experiment with friends!
Citizen Microbiology Workshop
UC Davis, Jan 23-24, 2012
Patrik D’haeseleer
patrikd@gmail.com @PatrikD
@BioCuriousLab BioCurious.org meetup.com/BioCurious

2. From garage lab to roving meetup to hackerspace
• Started as a garage research lab
• Has grown into world largest
DIYbio meetup, >700 members
• Biocurious recently opened a
2400 sq.ft. space in Sunnyvale
• Currently BSL-1, soon to be BSL-2
• Funded by Kickstarter
donations, membership and class
fees
• Education, Collaboration, Innovat
ion

3. Classes at BioCurious
• ~2 classes/week; 10-40 people at a time
• Winogradsky columns
• Build your own Biosphere
• GFP expression in E. coli
• DNA barcoding
• Bioinformatics
• PCR
• …

4. BioCurious Community Project proposals
• Isolate toxin-degrading bacteria
• Testing alternative medicine/food supplements
• Armpit microbiome (with Quantified Self community)
• Kombucha forensics – provenance of starter cultures
• Aquarium/aquaponics microbiome
• Tracking dandelion dispersal
• Fish DNA barcoding (class last week)
Constraints:
• No BSL-2 yet no env. isolates, human samples
• Shoestring budget no large-scale sequencing
But we’d love to strike up collaborations!

5. Citizen Science?
• Not merely crowdsourcing!
You can do citizen science without crowdsourcing, and
crowdsourcing without any science (e.g. Mechanical Turk)
• Citizens as partners in the scientific process, not
merely sample providers
• Outreach and education
• “On the job” training (e.g. “expert” Foldit players)
• Access to data
• Engage in analysis of the results
• Acknowledge key contributions (e.g. Hanny’s
Voorwerp)

6. www.biocurious.org
a hackerspace for biotech
experiment with friends!
Citizen Microbiology Workshop
UC Davis, Jan 23-24, 2012
Patrik D’haeseleer
patrikd@gmail.com @PatrikD
@BioCuriousLab BioCurious.org meetup.com/BioCurious