Yup, here's my freezer. But I have not invested in the -80°C deep freezer necessary for stable long-term storage of RNA. But bacteria all have DNA genomes so stable for years at -20°C.
I just started throwing out old samples for space, but only "boring" ones.

Perhaps if I had had this test at the time, I could have taken some antibiotics right at the start and not needed to miss the conference, and not felt lousy for 12 days! I don't understand why more people aren't curious to actually understand what organism has infected them!

Code, file format documentation and USB protocol specification are available at github.com/RByers/zpcrweb and rapidly evolving. Without a tool as powerful as Claude Code this would have taken me years to build!

Instead (or at least ahead) of spending $2,000 on the CFX Manager software BioRad sells, I had Claude reverse engineer the proprietary results file format and generate a script for converting the amplification curves to CSV format in less than 15 minutes!
That's good enough for day 1.

I forgot that my NEB Luna MM comes with a ROX-like reference dye, so there's an orange background glow in all tubes. It doesn't seem to inhibit detection in the amber channel on my Biomeme qPCR, but it's sure annoying when looking visually like this.

I mean we're all spewing our DNA out into the air and surfaces we touch all day, every day. It's getting increasingly untenable to think of keeping this information secret unless you want to live the rest of your life in a bubble!

I appreciate that I am privileged in that I live in a country, Canada, where I trust my government to protect me from genetic discrimination and surveillance. But we should all demand this freedom from our governments.

Also, I'd seriously consider just starting with the Bento Lab and trying their reagents: bento.bio. It looks like it would be just a little more expensive than my shopping list, but more compact and probably more beginner-friendly.

If anyone has a source for good lab-quality denatured ethanol that will work with spin column extraction, let me know. I know "real" labs use pure ethanol, but it's heavily regulated. The BioBasic 15% methanol has always worked fine with their EZ-10 kits for me, but I don't see it on their site now.

Also my non-frost-free is working as intended though I'm clearly due for a manual defrost 😀. I think moist air leaks through the seal where I run a temperature probe, I really need to drill and seal a hole like I have for my mini-fridge.

Now looks like this (including a couple additional items I forgot yesterday).

Right sorry, I meant non-frost-free 😂. Will correct. Link is correct.

Of course a consumer product like pluslife.com is far more practical and of similar quality in practice, and less error-prone. But getting into DIY lab experiments can be a lot of fun, and opens up a whole additional world of possibilities as I describe at lab.rbyers.ca/essays/20260....

This is a new test I've never used before, CiTest Flu A+B / RSV / Adenovirus Combo: canadastrong.ca/products/cit...