There are more consumables involved there beyond just reagents and a lot of it was/is proprietary. The machines all had their own consumable physical bits for sequencing as well and getting your hands on those would also be a blocker.
Applied Biosystems Sanger capillary machines (the 37XX series) had polymers that were injected into the capillaries to reflow between runs (the polymer took the place of the physical slab of gel). The capillaries themselves were also consumable and would wear out after so many runs. They were extremely expensive even 20-30 years ago when these were state of the art. You also need the dideoxy dye terminators you read about in the article. The patents on BigDye are expired now (the patents were ABI's principal moat on the Sanger tech and they aggressively used it against competitors like MegaBACE) but it's not like that's a growth market for a vendor trying to make a generic replacement.
Similar with the 454 -- the process would fragment up the DNA into lots of tiny shards, and bind the fragments to microscopic beads. There was a physical flow cell chip that you would flow the beads onto. The chip had microscopic "beehive" cells to hold the beads such that you had a vast array of miniature test tubes running reactions in parallel while the machine imaged the result. These chips were one and done after every sequencer run, and were precision manufactured. They were manufactured by fusing together a bundle of fiber optics and then slicing it like bread, such that you had a glass chip and the space between the fibers became the cells. You'd need the beads, the chips, and the reagents to produce the reactions the machine is looking for.
Without all the reagents and physical necessities these machines are just some really fancy cameras with onboard lasers.
Long story short it's fun to think about getting one of these machines, but unless you use it as a cool looking coffee table that appeals to graying molecular biologists, you're going to be disappointed.
I worked in this space for over a decade. It's so weird to me to see the workhorse sequencing hardware like the ABI 37x/37xx series, 454, and Illumina machines now as literal museum pieces.
I've been watching the Québécois version of Taskmaster with community-made subtitles and I love how the subtitle writers have included brief idiomatic explanations for the swearing that is constantly peppered into the dialogue.
I came upon a spare Touch ID keyboard. I just got Command strips and adhered the whole keyboard to the underside of my desk. USB cable is clipped to the desk and goes to my dock. I've got the fingerprint reader right next to my standing desk controls so it's really convenient, and I still get to use my Keychron as my keyboard. The low profile of the Apple keyboard means it doesn't get in the way.
Also every time I need to unlock my Mac or sudo I get to feel like I'm tripping the silent alarm at the bank.
I have a UniFi doorbell that I chose because it's self hosted and the video stays in my home. It also easily lets you get an RTSP stream of the camera feed.
Earlier this spring we put a bird feeder outside the front door and it dawned on me I could be piping the doorbell cam into BirdNET to classify the bird calls. With an RTSP stream there's no need to mount a microphone anywhere, that comes for free from the doorbell.
My wife is the bird person in the house more so than I am, but it was still really fun to set up and watch the identifications come across.
20+ years ago during undergrad my OO design class had us writing C++ on Solaris. We were told that unless it compiled and ran on Sun we'd get a zero.
This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.
We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.
They also have a fundamental interest in protecting the reputation of their product, which is definitely at risk from someone burning themselves with counterfeit gloves.
I assume by “souped up” they mean they modded it. You can go onto Amazon and get adapters to retrofit HDD-based iPods with flash, and a replacement battery too as long as you’re cracking it open.
I did this with an old 5G video iPod and it was a 15 minute job. Worked better than new because there wasn’t the lag in switching songs from waiting for the HDD to spin up.
Applied Biosystems Sanger capillary machines (the 37XX series) had polymers that were injected into the capillaries to reflow between runs (the polymer took the place of the physical slab of gel). The capillaries themselves were also consumable and would wear out after so many runs. They were extremely expensive even 20-30 years ago when these were state of the art. You also need the dideoxy dye terminators you read about in the article. The patents on BigDye are expired now (the patents were ABI's principal moat on the Sanger tech and they aggressively used it against competitors like MegaBACE) but it's not like that's a growth market for a vendor trying to make a generic replacement.
Similar with the 454 -- the process would fragment up the DNA into lots of tiny shards, and bind the fragments to microscopic beads. There was a physical flow cell chip that you would flow the beads onto. The chip had microscopic "beehive" cells to hold the beads such that you had a vast array of miniature test tubes running reactions in parallel while the machine imaged the result. These chips were one and done after every sequencer run, and were precision manufactured. They were manufactured by fusing together a bundle of fiber optics and then slicing it like bread, such that you had a glass chip and the space between the fibers became the cells. You'd need the beads, the chips, and the reagents to produce the reactions the machine is looking for.
Without all the reagents and physical necessities these machines are just some really fancy cameras with onboard lasers.
Long story short it's fun to think about getting one of these machines, but unless you use it as a cool looking coffee table that appeals to graying molecular biologists, you're going to be disappointed.