So much new DNA! (and MANY other updates/papers) (Patreon)

Over the last few weeks I've been ordered an enormous amount of bio supplies and DNA for upcoming videos. So I wanted to take a moment to give ya'll a bit of a peak into what I've got brewing and share some papers related to my new acquisitions. And for those less interested in bio videos, fear not, I'm also working on several very fun other videos (detecting antimatter/cosmic rays, testing negative ion products, making synthetic opal, and other).

In terms of bio stuff, top of the list is about the thing everyone is talking about right now, coronavirus. The bio video for this month will be a deep dive into how the virus works, and demonstrating how you test for it, as well as how vaccines and treatments are being made. We'll be running the actual diagnostic test for the virus (which, fingers crossed comes up negative) by preforming RT PCR on a saliva sample. We'll also do RT PCR on amylase as a positive control and PCR on mitochondrial DNA as a second positive control. That one will be a lot of fun so stay tuned.
RT PCR basics:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcription_polymerase_chain_reaction  

Another one I think ya'll will be excited about is finally an update to the lactose project. I've ordered some X-gal which is a color changing dye the responds to the presence of lactase and will be making my own lactase using a couple different organisms, and then updating on the status of the gene therapy. In short, it's mostly worn off at this point, but we expected that and I'll explain why and next steps in the video.
Xgal:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-gal 

 Also the spider silk plasmid we had made arrives this week, or early next week depending on how long it takes other things to ship, so we could have our first spider silk by the end of the month. We're going to be isolating the GFP gene out of the plasmid I showed in my recent transformation video and adding it to the silk plasmid so we can see if it's working properly and we'll show that whole process. Super excited. Been waiting for this for months and I'm super excited to start finally working on it in the lab again. 

 Now for the fun new stuff. Before we try putting the silk into yeast, we need something which is fun and ideally easy to test our ability to actually get DNA into yeast, and since our gfp beer plasmid was garbage (thanks to the odin!), we picked up something a little more interesting. I showed a still of this in the latest video, but I picked up a plasmid that makes the yeast you put it into produce B-carotene and as such are vibrant orange. We'll be using this to brew an orange beer and bake orange bread (that should be extra healthy) and the whole thing will be a lot of fun.
Paper on how this works:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1932764/ 

 On a similar note I also picked up one that makes yeast produce limonene (the scent of lemons) so we'll be making a lemon-y beer as well. Both will be the proving ground for yeast transformation and once they're working we'll move on to the silk.
Paper:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29471044

 Another fun one I picked up is a plasmid that works in e. coli that converts b-carotene to the red/orange dye astaxanthin. So once we've got the carotene yeast working, we're going to see if we can grow the yeast, autoclave them, and then add the bacteria to make the red dye. Should be fun!
Paper:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21862704 

Something which will also be quite cool is a plasmid I've wanted for YEARS. It's called pdawn and it makes the bacteria you put it into respond to the presence of light. So we're going to see if we can take an actual photo using only bacteria and a pin hole.
Plasmid:  https://www.addgene.org/107741/

 Finally I picked up some pVib which is a classic bioluminescence plasmid, but I also got some actual vibrio fischerii which is the organism that bioluminescence pathway comes from. This way I can see what's brighter, the original, or the copy. There isn't much in the way of good V. fischeri images online, so I'm excited to take lots of pretty pictures. 

Beyond that there's a few more things that are in the works that won't arrive for a little while still.

First up, we're working with freegenes to have the bioluminescence pathway from a species of glowing fungi made so that it can be expressed in plants. That's right, WE'RE MAKING GLOWING PLANTS!! Super excited for that one, but it's a few months out at least and will take time to get working. Will post more details as things progress but I've included the paper we're replicating. It's one of the most clever bioluminescence pathways I've ever seen.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/809376v1.full.pdf 

 Next a friend of mine is having a plasmid made that expresses tyrosinase, aka the thing that makes melanin in animals. So soon we'll have a melanin producing bacteria (and eventually plants maybe). Why is this interesting you ask? Well apparently bacteria that produce melanin can use radiation as if it was light for a sort of photosynthesis called radiosynthesis. We'll be putting this to the test to see. Also we're gonna eventually put it into yeast to make a black halloween beer. Gross, but fun!
Paper:  https://aem.asm.org/content/74/4/1190

 And on the topic of radiation, the last slow burner is a weird one. Tardigrades have at least one protein that is largely responsible for their unique and amazing ability to survive enourmous levels of radiation. It's called Dsup aka damage suppressor protein. We're having a plasmid made that will express this in animal cells and we'll see if we can make human cells immune to radiation using it. In the paper I've linked to below, adding this protein made cells survive 4 gray worth of radiation as if it was nothing. For context, you'd be SUPER dead if that happened to you. Will be fun, but again several months out.
Edit: as I was writing this I found that addgene carries this plasmid already. So no need to synthesize it anymore, we're just going to buy it. Still will be a bit till we test it, but... ya. Always check addgene first kids. 

Plasmid: https://www.addgene.org/90019/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6YfV_vK25wIVSrzACh3IbQKGEAAYASAAEgJocvD_BwE
Paper:   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034306/ 

 Ok I think that's it. I know this was a lot so I've included as many pictures and links to papers as I could. Technically there's actually even more (I bought some slime mold and some more chromoproteins and stuff) but this was already getting too long. I hope you're all as excited as I am! This is gonna be an amazing year.