Breakfast can be a pretty depressing ordeal, especially on these cold, dark mornings. Why not genetically engineer your yogurt to turn it into into a pharmacy-grade antidepressant? That ought cheer the process up. Here’s how to do it.
Talking at an event organized by Next Nature, Tuur van Balen guides you through the process in this video. The process takes 4-5 days, and will see you insert open-source DNA code, ordered off the internet, into a bacterial cell culture. You might need to purchase a few pieces of kit off eBay, sure — in particular a centrifuge and a electroporator — but the process is definitely achievable, if not advisable, in your own home.
While he makes it sounds easy — and actually, getting DNA into a well-studied bacterial cell is fairly easy — some of the theory behind the process might take you longer to get your head round. In particular, designing a functional, useful and safe gene sequence isn’t easy. But that doesn’t matter: you can just borrow van Balen’s in order to make your own orange-coloured Prozac yogurt. [Next Nature]