[epiphany47]

Going back to the barcoding of trees, how would you do it? I assume you'd use some sort of SNP identification or specific DNA primers, but then you've just got a bunch of DNA in a tube.

The typical way of visualizing DNA is using an electrophoresis gel - most of the components are cheap/easy to obtain (agarose, electrodes, power supply, buffer), but how would you visualize your gel? Typical ethidium bromide stains are probably out of the question, given that ethidium bromide is so carcinogenic - most people probably don't have access to ethidium bromide. Maybe use a safer stain? (googling seems to point to invitrogen's SYBR Safe DNA stain as a possibility).

Then again, you could just use a UV spec to measure concentration, but how many people have a UV spec?

Looking forward to your results! In the future I think it would be nice to have open source enzyme starters (kind of like brewers/bakers yeast starter kits?) so that people could just grow+purify their own enzymes. (after the open source centrifuge that is =P )