DIY with a goal !

Canadian Capital's Community Biology Group

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Our mission is to foster a vibrant bioscience community and advance citizen science and molecular biology education.

We believe that combining cutting-edge molecular biology research with public education has the power to create a better world and accelerate scientific progress.

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GFP expressing E-coli colonies — Actual image of 700+ colonies of GFP expressing E-coli using the robot we designed and built.

We are a group of bio enthusiasts from all walks of life, with different professions and age groups getting together to discuss and perform bio projects and create bio equipment.

As far as we know, at the time of this writing, we are the only active community biology group east of Vancouver in Canada. We started our activity around 2018 and many of our initial members came from BioTown, a Ottawa based group that was active for four years prior to that.

Our activities are offered to members as well as to external participants. We have managed to build and buy sufficient equipment to perform most of basic biology operation sufficient for a Risk1 category lab which translates to a BSL1 in US.

We require all the participants to read and follow the mandatory biosafety regulation before wet lab activities. Biosafety regulation Regulation and enforcement is the responsibility of Public Health Agency of Canada.

We have participated in the last 2 editions of Public Health Agency of Canada Biosummit held in Ottawa in 2020 and 2026. Adrian - our organizer presented our activity and took part of several panel discussions. Canadian Health Agency Biosummit Agenda

As far as we know, at the time of this writing, there are only two more community DIY bio groups one in Vancouver oand one in Victoria, BC. The largest one is in Vancouver Open Science Network Society. It is organized by Scott Pownall and it is independent from academia. There are one more active group we are aware of and that is Victoria BC Victoria Makerspace

There used to be one active group in Montreal organized by Kevin Chen and Toronto however they have not been active in the last five years.

A bit of history for the Community Bio movement

The term "DIYBio" a concept of do-it-yourself biology has been known as early as 1988. DIYBio entered the San Francisco programmer and maker communities as early as 2005, through simple demonstrations of basic experiments. As DIYbio experiments became the focus of SuperHappyDevHouse hackers, the hobby gained additional momentum. The Ottawa Bio Science is a movement promoted by bio Enthusiasts as support for the DIYBio movement