Maureen Muldavin

I backed your guys project and hope that you are successful in your fundraising. I would highly suggest establishing a twitter account and pursuing press. I don't think Open Insulin would have been successful without media attention.

Thanks Josh! We just might take you up on that at some point. :)

$900!? That might be the record for cost of insulin. Yes, you can absolutely help :) Send me an email at Muldavin.m@gmail.com and I'll find you an assignment.

Here is a chart that shows the standard abbreviations: http://www.genome.jp/kegg/catalog/codes1.html

Awesome! The characters above represent the amino acids that make up our protein. That picture is in fact our code and could be used to order a plasmid identical to ours. There are a number of different ways that each amino acid can be coded for in DNA, so we do have a file somewhere with the bases that make up our construct. Optimizing the code to best fit the organism (e-coli in this case) and the protein to be expressed is called codon optimization. Here is a brief lesson: http://www.dnaftb.org/22/index.html Counter Culture Labs is teaching beginning bio-engineering classes in the next few months. If you live in the bay area, we would love to have you come. http://www.meetup.com/Counter-Culture-Labs/ I believe that we just e-mailed a text file to the company that created our plasmid. As far as online genetic databases, GenBank allows you to search known genes. It contains data from the US, Europe and Japan. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/

Yes! We are planning to create the open source protocol to produce insulin. Then a company can produce the generic drug. I know some kickass type 1 diabetics, so we needed to make sure they could survive to be on our zombie team. The only problem now is that they might be able to outrun me :-)

Thanks for the support! We are too! Josiah transformed a bunch of cells this week. So, we are looking forward to playing with our newly engineered colonies in a couple of days!

Thank you! Really appreciate the encouragement and support.

That's the plan! Thanks for the support!

I think we are pretty set on wild-type insulin at this point, but we have really enjoyed talking about your insightful questions and comments. In fact, we are hoping to recruit you! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ccl-insulin If you have some free time, we would love for you to participate in our planning and research!

Thanks so much for donating more and being so encouraging! I'll go try and talk to the experiment.com guys. I think they pushed us off the front page once we reached our first goal. Like Patrik said, we are hoping to raise enough to put our heads down and produce some solid scientific results. At that point both press and fundraising should be a lot easier.

Thanks so much for your support!