We have a bottleneck on DNA preps of the Open DNA Collections and I know that is also affecting the Reclone Hubs and Nodes - not everyone has the facilities to prep hundreds of constructs.
We still need to do an initial miniprep of everything and supply >1 ug DNA so we can’t send immediately because there are some recent parts that my lab have which are still only glycerol stocks. However, they advertise midiprep/Petiteprep yields (0.2 mg to 0.5 mg) for £17 per sample (minipreps of 5-10 ug are £3).
iGEM only ship 1-2ng DNA per well, my lab were adding much more to our initial distributions because our automated magbead preps were low quality and had a lot of RNA contamination.
If we get a high quality prep of 0.2 mg DNA, we can make 100,000 distribution plates and probably not need to prep again for a long time, at least for distribution. Obviously for downstream cloning the end user would need to amplify and prep.
I’m tempted to do this and then up to 100 Reclone Hubs/Nodes can receive enough DNA to make an additional 1000 plates before they need to prep any of their own DNA. Midipreps of up to 500 parts would be £8500, then of course there are plates and shipping.
I’m going to include this budget an upcoming grant proposal, if anyone else gets the chance to do similar then please do, so we maximise chances!
Also, other ideas or tips on service providers are very welcome.
I’m back in touch since my last account Ahmed Atef) is inaccessible for now.
I strongly believe that adapting a model of regional distribution hubs around the world will lead to a significant reduction in cost per hub and improve global logistics.
On our side, we’ve made progress in efficiency: we’ve standardized the miniprep protocol using the BOM magnetic beads preparation and purification kit, bringing our final cost for miniprep down to less than $0.20, the final cost of plate is about 20 $ (200ng/well)
Finally, we are the EGYPTIAN SOCIETY OF SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY would like to formally offer our services as a regional distribution hub for DNA collections. We can handle the distribution for free, requiring only that the partner cover the shipping costs.
Sorry to arrive late to the discussion,
I have a protocol to share with you using low cost silica coated magnetic beads. Please take a look if you find it useful (jump to section for plasmid purification):