What can I exactly do with it? Can I find any gene and how does that really work? The video introduced some gels which reveal the DNA bits, but without further info it's not clear how does it find a particular gene. Really awesome stuff anyway.
PCR requires short (typically synthesized) DNA primers to initiate replication. That is, you must know the DNA sequences at the beginning and end of the region you want to amplify. Ideally you would know the entire sequence so you can synthesize primers that have one and only one binding site.
Amplifying DNA is useful/necessary for all sorts of biological procedures. High concentrations of DNA are needed for efficiently transfecting microbes, for example.
Fortunately, primers are relatively cheap, typically under $0.30/base, so for two 20bp primers, you may end up paying as much for shipping as for the synthesis itself.
These days, it's also pretty rare that you won't know the complete genome of the species you're working with, and there are free web tools that can help you design unique primers.
there are free web tools that can help you design unique primers.
True, but if you are going to your own PCR, you might as well do your own primer design. It's practically the "hello, world!" of bioinformatics, not to mention that a primer design server might not be able to help you if you're trying to do something fancy.
Hey Tito, congrats on shipping! This is Patrick from Baltimore-- we talked for a bit at iGEM and the FBI DIY-BIO thing last year.
In the dry lab, I'm really more of a regular PCR consumer than a regular PCR user, but yeah, my attitude towards PCR is more or less my attitude towards snakes: try to keep a respectful distance :-)
Are there any good guides or tutorials for DIY bioinformatics? Targeted for people who are interested to learn about bioinformatics in practice in addition to theory.
From the wikipedia article [1]
"PCR is used to amplify a specific region of a DNA strand (the DNA target). Most PCR methods typically amplify DNA fragments of up to ~10 kilo base pairs (kb), although some techniques allow for amplification of fragments up to 40 kb in size.[5]"
What that means is this: you have a sample of some DNA or protein. Typically it might be only one copy or only a handful of copies. Nothing in bioscience works on tiny copies; you typically need thousands or millions, particularly for operations like dna sequencing. PCR allows you to amplify -- ie copy -- your sample by causing the DNA helix to split from heat, including a polymerase or enzyme that does the replication work, including spare dna bases, then cooling to cause the helixes to reform. It's essentially a doubling operation; you run k heating/splitting/replication/cooling cycles and at the end hopefully have (#{ starting copies }) * 2^k
Doing the previous operation requires a pcr device which very accurately and evenly heats and cools a microtitre plate; the polymerase; something to dump all this into like very clean water; and raw dna base pairs.
