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Making science accessible for everyone

Charlottesville Open Bio Labs allow students, residents to take part in research, experiments

Charlottesville Open Bio Labs, located on West Main Street, is a public laboratory space for anyone interested in pursuing biological research, and it provides a variety of educational programs in research techniques and creative applications.

Lead Education Intern George Saado, a second-year College student, said he is excited about its promise as an institution that fosters community involvement in biological research and development.

“Whole genome sequencing they do for like a hundred dollars now,” Saado said. “It’s crazy. It’s amazing, so we want to bring these technologies and this knowledge to the general public. We want to make it more accessible.”

Active projects at the lab include synthesizing paper from kombucha tea, using waste vegetable oil to fuel furnaces and applying the root structure, or mycelium, of mushrooms to water filtration. A number of the lab’s projects have received funding through University grants.

Abigail Power, a second-year College student, said that despite having no science background, she is enthusiastic to be working on the kombucha paper project, which is set for commercial development.

“It’s kind of exciting because we’re actually getting a product to sell,” Power said. “It’s good to be a little entrepreneurial — I’m trying to open up a restaurant someday, so it’s good to know the ins and outs of starting a company.”

The lab, which opened September of last year, was co-founded by University alumnus Shaun Moshasha, and Michael Lake, a software developer and former biology professor. Moshasha said he was first inspired to open the lab while competing on the University’s International Genetically Engineered Machine team.

“It was actually at those competitions where I started noticing this new institution, called a do-it-yourself biology laboratory, and I said, ‘That’s really freaking cool. Like, what is do-it-yourself biology?’” Moshasha said.

He explained the concept in terms of a makerspace, a creative space that anyone can rent out and use shared equipment to design and engineer their own creations.

“It’s essentially the same thing where you have a makerspace, but you have a biology makerspace,” Moshasha said. “So instead of 3D printers and CNC milling machines and laser cutters and things like that, you have thermocyclers, and centrifuges, and micropipettes and incubators.”

Moshasha considers Charlottesville to be the perfect place for this kind of lab because of its culture of supporting community involvement and innovation.

The lab offers classes open to the public on a variety of topics. Recent events included a cloning class — in which participants genetically engineered their own organisms — and a discussion of potential treatments for the Zika virus.

A major focus of the lab is promoting youth engagement in science, particularly biology. It provides a number of afterschool and summer programs for high school students.

“We teach them all these techniques like DNA replication, ligation, transformation, electrophoresis, and our hope, by [youth] taking these classes, is that they’ll become interested to pursue their own projects,” Saado said.

Looking to the future, Moshasha said he wants to build up the educational base of the organization and then use the funding from that to expand future projects. By 2017, he hopes to begin expanding to different cities.

“Synthetic biology is an area and a field that’s going to be touching on everybody’s lives,” Moshasha said. “People thought, early on, in the ’90s that, or ’80s, that the Internet and the computers were only for those nerds. And look how much it’s radically transformed everyone’s lives. Synthetic biology’s gonna have an even greater impact.”

The lab does not claim any intellectual property rights for the products its makers develop. Students and Charlottesville residents are encouraged to become involved with the lab in any of a variety of research and educational capacities, regardless of their background.

“My call to action is that anybody who this peaks the interest of slightly, don’t be deterred by thinking, ‘Oh, this seems so scientific that I can’t get my hands involved,’” Moshasha said. “No, no, no, the point is, we want everybody, no matter how, or what you know, what field you know, to get involved.”

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