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I gave a talk at that workshop! (I’m making the 61 codon version of JCVI-Syn3a)

You can get the cells as a researcher, but basically forget about it for a commercial user or hobbyist. They’re also annoying as hell to grow. I’m trying to synthesize it from scratch for the precise reason of freeing it from MTAs (material transfer agreements)

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I do some biology-adjacent programming work. I think protein and cell simulations would be a fun area to learn about. I am familiar with projects like OpenWorm. You seem pretty knowledgeable about the field. How does one get into computational biology? What prerequisite knowledge would I need to be able to write simulations like in this article?

Sounds like you're doing good work! Out of curiosity, can you give a layman's explanation of what makes them hard to grow?

Their media is real complicated and expensive (plus difficult to prepare: can’t just throw everything in an autoclave), and they don’t grow very fast, and they don’t grow to a high concentration. Basically that means that you can easily get contamination (like you would growing human cells), and even when you do get growth, it’s dilute.

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