jperfetto

The supplies and reagents you need are all readily available on the web. For basic supplies like pipettes and tubes, one of my favorite sources is http://www.bio-world.com . You'll also need a taq polymerase and primers - both of which tons of companies sell online, just search Google and look at the ads. Some companies will only ship these reagents to commercial addresses, but there's more than enough that will ship to residential.

We'll try to get more info on the site in the days to come.

This is Josh - one of the people behind the OpenPCR project. I agree with you that reagents can be a huge amount of the cost.

Part of this depends on the quantity of reactions you're doing. Taking the DNA barcoding of trees example we gave, if you're doing hundreds of reactions the cost can already be quite low as crocowhile pointed out. If you're just learning or doing a few reactions, here's where a kit containing small quantities of the needed reagents and educational information can be more cost effective.

The other part has to do with the exact reagents you need. Obviously if you can use an off the shelf master mix you'll pay much less than if you need to purchase a specialized enzyme and specific reaction buffer. There are cases where that is needed, but there's also cases where people purchase reagents more expensive than what they need, simply because they just want their reaction to work, they've found one way to make it work, and they'd rather spend more time on their project rather than finding the more cost effective ways to make it work.

Here there's a lot of opportunity for software or software coupled with hardware to find the most cost effective way to do a reaction and make it work better. For example, a PCR machine networked with a UV spec and some software could quantify template DNA, present recommendations on enzymes, calculate the best reaction parameters accurately, and tell the user exactly what quantities to add of primers/enzyme/buffer/water. Many users of PCR are not necessarily experts at PCR, so there's some opportunity to help people get better results while saving time and money.

We're thinking about these larger problems, but focusing on getting an accurate and reliable PCR machine working first. Once we have that, we'll have the foundation to pursue these other areas.