• Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 hour ago

    If I’m breeding for something like infectivity, then I set my petri dish with agar and growth medium inside a sealed box with other sterilized and preset, but not innoculated(I think that’s the right word), petri dishes. I induce a light draft using something like a fan. I also loaded a fair amount of self harvested human cells into each dish. I allow them to incubate after exposure to UV and if any survived and spread to a different dish to infect the cells there, I select the one that infected furthest away. I use a variety of different setups with different cells to ensure they have a general effect and don’t, say, only effect skin cells.

    If I’m breeding for lethality I directly measure how much of a toxin they generate, and breed the ones that generate more.

    If I’m breeding to induce new symptoms, then yes. I go around town infecting random people and stalking them to see what happens. If I’m doing biological terrorism I’m just guessing my own safety isn’t much of a concern.

    As for the resistance to UV, I never denied that you would end up breeding for UV resistance. But pumped UV lasers are a thing, I’m guessing there will always be a sweet spot between a resistance they can’t overcome and simply vaporizing the bacteria. While an unintentional side effect, it’s not the only resistance you’d be breeding for either. Once you have your bacteria you’d go through rounds of exposing it the antibiotics and harvesting the survivors. Hell, that’s not a terrible way to make a super plague on its own.

    The DIY kit is only valuable for the tooling, so I am glad we’re not stuck on that.

    As for the million dollar lab vs home setup, I’m not convinced that it can’t be replicated. I highly doubt The Thought Emporium has a million dollar set up, and yet they are able to do actual gene editing and growing a rat brain on a computer chip(again, simplification). Absolutely no clue how accurate this is, but they’re only pulling in about $3000 a month from videos at the max. And they make $1300 a month from patreon.. And this is their intro into DIY lab setups. It does not list THEIR costs, but it gives a good idea of costs for a starting setup.

    I’m… not done with this comment, but I’m currently at work and having to jump between multiple things is becoming difficult, so I’ll do more research tonight to present a better structured, funded, realistic, and deadly example of what a DIY setup can do. I think we’ve somewhat veered off my original topic, but I’ve really enjoyed this discussion and hypothetical, even though it mostly feels like a headstrong devils advocate situation at this point. I do have ADHD and my memory kinda sucks, so if I forget and you are interested in continuing then please message me sometime tomorrow either on here or in a dm