Glowing single cell organisms? Color changing Fungi? Flowers with any #rrggbb as petal color? albino lizards? Jurassic Park?
Serious question. Looking for a project that teaches me something and has a tangible result.
For example, apples are cultivars because if you grow an apple seed from a delicious apple you eat, the apples that get produced from your tree won't taste anything like the original. Orchards get around issue with growing tasty apples you love to eat by taking 'cuttings' (which are in essence a clone copy of that tree) from the parent tree and growing the cuttings into full mature trees.
Now I'm not saying grow apples, but look at interesting plants/trees that interest you and what you want to accomplish. Do you want to improve make a fruit more tasty? Faster growing plant? More medically potent effect? Etc.
> In short, a cultivar is a plant that is produced and maintained by horticulturists but does not produce true-to-seed; whereas, a variety is a group of plants within a species that has one or more distinguishing characteristics and usually produces true-to-seed. [0]
[0] - https://extension.unl.edu/statewide/buffalo/Yard/Cultivar%20...
https://phytooracle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
People have been making more delicious fruit for thousands of years with no technology (as we would think of it today).
What you can do and what you can do are different things. Genetic engineering and biological manipulation go as deep as software, and tacit knowledge about execution is non-trivial to the point where you WILL mess up experiments (so expect to repeat a lot).
That said, you can still do some fun stuff. I would recommend trying to do something very small but actually novel. For example, if you've done a GFP transformation into E.coli, try to get the GFP transformation working in a new organism (maybe a yogurt bacteria). Keep it small though, and keep it single cellular, or else you are putting yourself into the pit of despair.
Also check out the Poly project (https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly). We're basically building (decent) open-source software for doing synthetic biology. Since you're a software developer, doing code reviews and reading our mega-comments (like https://github.com/TimothyStiles/poly/blob/prime/transformat...) might help you understand some more of the fundamental engineering problems we synthetic biologists are encountering. Also, in code reviews, if you don't understand something, a practicing synthetic biologist will explain it to you so that we can improve our docs.
You say you're "Looking for a project that teaches me something".
You need to figure out what that something is, then then look for a minimum viable experiment to work your way toward it.
It is also well-defined in its own way, you need to know something before you even know how to narrow down your interests.
A 0th step, “what’s a cool project roughly in this area” seems like a well-posed question.
What's a project to teach me about programming?
Make a game for guessing a number 0..100 - game gives you “Goldilocks feedback”.
Make a program that sorts numbers.
Make a pong game.
Make a Harry Potter “sorting hat”: ask a few questions and allocate to one of the houses on some silly rules.
Just off the top of my mind.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ
I'd suggest watching the 2nd (retrospective) video first, and then the first video if you're interested in more detail.
Was this ever reported anywhere? This is crazy news.
My mind also remains blown.
Summary: Guy is lactose intolerant. He inserts a sequence providing lactose tolerance into an adeno-associated virus. He then infects himself with this virus, which inserts the target sequence into his own genome.
He is then able to gorge himself on pizza without digestive problems, and he's still able to do so several months later.
The adeno-associated virus is like a retrovirus, except that, per [0], the AAV will insert at a particular location in the genome, instead of at random locations.
http://bi1x.caltech.edu/2019/handouts/c_elegans_optogenetics...
It skips the process of getting your worms to express Chr2, but there's protocols to help with that:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Tormenting small things with short life cycles in hopes of finding interesting adaptations and mutations is certainly doable in a kitchen, or in a closet fermenting tank and drink some of the byproducts. Its an interesting argument was a new sourdough culture or brewers yeast "developed" or "domesticated" or just "caught".
Towards wet lab, a lot of the actual reagents (DNA oligos, enzymes, etc.) are not going to be easy to get for personal use (for obvious reasons), but an understanding of how these work is going to be necessary. You'll need to know how to use PCR but you won't be able to get an instrument for under a few hundred dollars on eBay, so you could program/build your own thermocycler (for example using a spare CPU[3]).
If you want to participate in these types of experiments without getting your hands wet, you can also check out the online games Eterna[4] (for RNA design, out of Stanford) or FoldIT[5] (for protein design, out of UWash). I used to be involved in the lab that runs Eterna and some of the stuff they're working on is very cool - mRNA vaccines, artificial ribosomes, and fluorescent molecular sensors.
[1] - https://www.rcsb.org/ [2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/ [3] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4165218/ [4] - https://eternagame.org/ [5] - https://fold.it/