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It's still fairly hard to do in a living room, if you want to do anything novel. You need probably low 4-figures of equipment first; a -20C freezer for DNA/buffer storage, small centrifuge, thermal cycler, some way of getting genes into a target, and incubation space for whatever you're modifying. Preferably you'll also have consistent temperature control and an extremely clean environment. You also need a source of primer sequences, which are short customized sequences of DNA used to tl;dr get a lot of copies of a DNA sequence which you only have in small quantities. Nothing too difficult, and much of that equipment can be DIY'd for the home lab. But many chemical suppliers also won't ship to residential addresses or onboard individuals as customers, so you'll need to incorporate and shop around a bit. And wet lab protocols can be very finicky; you'll probably need to run through your workflow a lot before you get to the point where you can semi-reliably go from start to finish without fucking up. Often, you won't know exactly how you fucked up, but you can't argue with a lack of results. It's possible, I think, but it's also time-consuming and difficult. Anyways, if you did get a reliable setup working with say, micropropagated plant specimens, there are far more interesting prizes than seeing what non-coding DNA does. Plants make all kinds of cool stuff, from scents to flavors to alkaloids. And they've demonstrated an ability to take genes from things like jellyfish for e.g. autoluminescence, too. |