You’re all invited to our Community Meeting next week, on 2024-03-19T14:00:00Z. We will hear from Yann de Kermadec (@YHK), presenting about Enzymethic: an Open-Source Company for Biologists.
The will to create an open-source company dedicated to producing and selling biology material comes from the experiences of the two founders in the Bay Area. After being part of multiple community labs, from Counter Culture Labs to Baltimore underground sciences, and participating in various projects, notably Open Insulin and Real Vegan Cheese, we realized that more infrastructures are needed to support the open source movement in the biology area. In this presentation, we will talk about what we mean by open source for biology, our motivations, and how we plan to achieve our goals.
Looking forward to seeing you all 2025-03-19T14:00:00Z to hear from Yann (@YHK) talk about Enzymethic: an Open-Source Company for Biologists.
See the joining links in the first post above!
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Is having open-source/IP-free enzymes and molecular biology products useful to you?
Let us know in the poll and in comments below about if you would use such products and for what purpose - we’d love to know!
Is having open-source/IP-free enzymes and molecular biology products useful to you?
No
Not sure - never considered it
Yes - but I only really work in an education/academic research context, so it doesn’t make much different to me
Yes - I look for all things open, whether for education, research, industry purposes, and more
Yes - and I’m looking to use it in commercial settings
Yes - other reasons (please post more in the comments below)
Yes, it was very interesting talk and also was epic quest to open source yeast system, I loved to hear @YKH and @eperkins about bio-security ( the topic I need to learn more aboout), I wish if @eperkins can give us a talk about.
I can not wait until uploading this talk to revise it more and more.
I may help @YKH in bioinformatics and assemble the genome, and my make some plans to modify it for making it suitable for recombinant protein production.
Hi Ahmed,
I’m not sure I’m really qualified to give a talk about biosecurity. I’ve represented Addgene at various biosecurity workshops over the years, but it would be a tricky thing to talk about with an international audience like Reclone because every country has pretty different policies around biosecurity (much as they have different definitions of what qualifies as a GMO).
As I mentioned during the seminar, the policy people I’ve talked to like Addgene’s MTA system because it leaves a “paper trail” of which labs have what. The harder thing for Addgene has been to determine what parts of our plasmid collection might actually qualify as security risks. There are a few sequence databases out there that claim to be good sources of truth for anything that could be deemed a biosecurity risk, but a) I don’t know how they are determining what DNA sequences qualify as a risk and b) getting access to these databases is prohibitively expensive for many. They are most definitely NOT open.
Happy to answer more specific questions or participate in a conversation at some point, but again, I’m not a biosecurity expert by any means. --Eric
Thanks for your insights! It’s very helpful to know about the biosecurity challenges and how Addgene’s MTA system plays a role in tracking materials. I’m particularly interested in how the MTA offerings at Addgene could help facilitate the open-source development of biomaterials.
Could you elaborate on the types of MTAs Addgene offers and whether any of them are particularly suited for open-source or community-driven projects? I’m curious about which frameworks would enable the sharing and development of biomaterials while still addressing biosecurity concerns.
You can read about most of our options here: https://www.addgene.org/techtransfer/. We deal with the Uniform Biological MTA (UBMTA), which does not make the item eligible for industry distribution; the OpenMTA, which makes the item available to anyone; and the Industry MTA (IMTA), which makes something available to industry with some restrictions. There are some more nuanced non-MTA options for depositing, but they are rare so far.
The OpenMTA is, as the name implies, the most open. Materials with this agreement can be used for virtually anything. That includes giving them to other people. That’s why, from a biosecurity point of view, OpenMTAs are less desirable. The ability to track who has the reagent in question ends as soon the first person who received something through an OpenMTA gives to someone not mentioned in that MTA. To be fair, there is nothing really stopping someone who requests an item with a UBMTA from giving the item(s) to someone else either, if they are willing to assume the risks that come with violating an agreement of this nature.
If you have further questions, it might be easiest to hop on a quick Zoom call at some point. Just let me know! --Eric
Join us via Zoom: Launch Meeting - Zoom
See the joining links in the first post above!
Is having open-source/IP-free enzymes and molecular biology products useful to you?