Biohackers starting new lab in Oakland

[marcjuul]

I'm part of the team so ask away! We're working towards having a larger BSL-1 (bio-safety level) lab for work with safe and well-known organisms and a smaller BSL-2 lab for stuff like growing certain environmental isolates and even some types of human disease work.

We're also working on software to increase the transparency of our research, such as this tool to instantly share hand written and recorded voice lab notes using open standards: https://github.com/CounterCultureLabs/dumpscribe

[tunabananas]

What kind of projects are happening there right now?

[marcjuul]

We're engineering yeast to produce a vegan source of cheese protein and in the long run make Real Vegan Cheese: https://realvegancheese.org

We're now hosting Bay Area Applied Mycology (formerly Bay Area Radical Mycology) and they have been using the lab for both genetic identification and microscopy identification of mushroom species.

We also have lots of events coming up such as Introduction to protein crystallography and Introduction to Synthetic Biology: http://www.meetup.com/Counter-Culture-Labs/#upcoming

[BlackHoleSun]

This seems like a great idea. We need more Biohacking labs to help citizen science projects.

[ceremona]

Cool. Any non-bio stuff going on at CCL?

[PatrikD]

Yes! We intentionally left "bio" out of the name, because we do want to be more general than that. We have people playing around with acoustics and optics, there's a Tesla coil and Geiger counter under construction, and I would love to play with some low-melt alloys. Plus there's tons of hardware hacking as well - especially repairing old or building new lab equipment.

It's probably fair to say that Bio is our main focus, but it's definitely not the only thing we do.

[jackiegene]

Cool!