this is no regular pc coolant but rather
bioluminescent coolant that you are about to watch us create with the help
of the genetically engineered bacteria that is behind us over there
it isn't the kind of thing you'd run in your pc 24 7 at least not exactly like
this but the biotechnology involved blew
my mind so let's have a chat about how we built the
world's first bioluminescent gaming pc
or as i call it the anglerfish
they don't have claws it's more like teeth but minor details
minor details like our sponsor war thunder war thunder is an online
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let's go back in time to before the anglerfish came to life though today
we're joined by the fine folks from nioka Labs whose main area of focus is
creating a sustainable glow stick by using bioluminescence to create the
light instead of harsh chemicals that can seep into the environment after
disposal in nature whether we're talking about a bacteria or a jellyfish
bioluminescence is created by combining two main compounds luciferin and
luciferase these are generic catch-all
words to describe actually a wide variety of different chemicals kind of
like how we say a battery has to have an anode and a cathode but the exact
materials that they're made of can vary greatly the combo we're using today is
derived from gaussian princeps a deep sea crustation that naturally glows blue
the only challenge is that these guys wouldn't be particularly happy trapped
inside a glow stick or your computer so instead the folks from nioka Labs take
the natural recipe from these guys and
then they get bacteria to fart out those same compounds that are needed to
produce the reaction the first step of this process is locating the chunk of a
creature's dna that is responsible for bioluminescence to find the specific
sequence you need one protein to separate the two strands of dna and read
a single strand creating rna the rna is
the code that will produce another protein that will execute a function in
the cell when bioluminescence is occurring you freeze the cell read the
rna that's floating around in there and then you try to link it to the function
of interest once you've figured out what bit of genetic code is responsible for
bioluminescence you order a primer off the internet which contains short
segments of the dna you need to make copies of along with dna segments that
are already present in the bacteria you then take a boatload of the dna primer
and chuck it into this guy right here the thermal cycler
this bad boy heats up the dna to around 100 degrees celsius at which point the
double strands separate into single strands because they can't stay together
at such high temperatures then you just get to hope that when it
cools back down the segments from your primer dna will bind to the regions of
the longer dna strands that are complementary
from here a protein comes in and repairs the dna turning that single strand back
into a double strand and in the process adding the bit of dna code that you need
for bioluminescence do this 20 or so
more times and you get loads of copies of the dna that you want to put into
your bacteria to make it glow from here you shoot all that dna into
the bacteria essentially injecting code and the bacteria will read that code and
create the luciferase needed for our bioluminescent reaction but enough talk
let's do it thanks to reductions in the cost of equipment and supplies this kind
of biological science can actually be performed at home all you will need is
some pipettes oops some pipette tips
some kind of media so this is essentially the food for our live
bacteria we'll get to those in a moment you'll need some live bacteria as well
as a oh centrifuge and
naturally safety equipment safety first ladies and
gentlemen now obviously we're going to do this cooking show style since you
guys don't want to wait 24 hours for our dna altered e coli to grow in our
nutrient solution here so we would then take that which instead of looking like
mildly dehydrated but still relatively healthy pee would look like extremely
cloudy you need to go see your doctor pee we take that we throw it into our
centrifuge here for probably somewhere in the neighborhood of
five ten minutes something along those lines we pour off the extra and we end
up with this concentrated e coli
oh don't worry this is not the pathogenic kind this is like
specifically engineered to be safe otherwise they wouldn't let me handle it
right that's true that's true so i will not be
making any unscheduled visits to the bathroom
now oh it stinks okay we can actually use this to create a
reaction check this out so we've got uh hold on i've got my
luciferase and i've got my uh luciferin i want my luciferin i'm gonna
take a hundred microliters of this they don't believe i can do it properly i
know it i'm gonna go down to the first stop
slowly draw wow look at that the system works it's
right at the mark is that is that what it's supposed to do
all right cool here we go then we're going to drop this puppy in here
see you later and watch this oh wow you can actually
see it's working already what yeah yeah yeah yeah don't worry i got
this i got this oh you know i'll shake it first then we'll hit the light
okay go for it go for it oh there's another light damn
whoa that is sick
get it because it's e coli
and this is a completely organic reaction right
glow overheat right that makes sense enzymes see i remember a couple of
things from uh you know grade 10 science
i've been informed it's not heat speeding up the reaction it's actually
oxygen that causes the luciferin to glow more brightly oh wow it's already dying
it's dying oh it's back whoa okay hold on a second whoa whoa
whoa okay so let's just get some oxygen into it no no don't
worry i'm not gonna i'm not gonna i wasn't gonna do that okay but now we'll
probably have more oxygen in the air in here so we shake it do we get a brighter
glow ah hard to say
there it goes
so good for you you made an unhealthy pee looking disease vial that glows
obviously this is not the end game so the next step is we run this through
what's called a nickel column our protein was engineered with a histidine
tag and that is going to be naturally attracted to the nickel along the
outsides of this column as we're pouring it through so what we can do is we pour
the whole thing through all the garbage makes it through to the end then we
actually sever that histidine tag and we
wash it through and we end up with nothing but our
luciferase so this should give us a much stronger
reaction right you guys aren't you guys aren't setting me up here to do a lame demo are you
they wouldn't do that they seem like nice people uh this is my
10 microliters okay just 10 microliters this time
this is the tricky part okay we're ready
there's just one site on our protein where the reaction takes place so you're
gonna see that if we if we kept this completely still
um the like the end product would end up kind of gunking it up and that yellow
glow would actually go away after a while but if we mix it
things get really interesting okay let's kick the lights oh yeah you can actually oh that's so
cool you can see where it's kind of seeping down into it
okay ready oh wow
that's fantastic and it's not cloudy
no trip to the doctor today and the best part is because of the
washing process there is no e coli inside it
honestly though my kids aren't that into yellow glow sticks
so um what can we do about that
oh let's try another color shall we they wouldn't let us do science with our
LTT Store water bottle but they're they're great for drinking out
of all right we've got to use we'll use your flask
there's no pipetting this is just like a dried ready to rock glow stick
oh damn wow the green one's really bright
holy smokes
whoa that is awesome
holy crap i bet you can even see my face andy
okay let me crank it oh my god
oh that is so cool
so then conceivably if you wanted to make like a liter of this
you could just you could do that yeah
this one lasts about 20 minutes okay can you make it last longer
yes so there's a lot of chemistry that goes on it goes into the glow reaction
and by adjusting the additives uh in the reaction we maybe we may be able to make
it glow for longer right or conceivably you could design
you know glow stick capsules that have like a slow release mechanism of some
sort or something along those lines too so also engineering the actual enzyme to
work better
right it's never been done before right so we're already seeing load times that
are really really long like beyond five hours but now we're working to make it
brighter and like more awesome got it
i guess i saw it at the beginning of the video so there's no real surprise to
spoil can we put it in the computer now
let's do it uh oh what the computer's not done alex you had one job
research the video get in touch with these guys write the video build the
computer wrangle me
one job all right let's have some fun here ladies and gentlemen
all right uh hit me with maybe like 300 mils this time
we're gonna we're gonna launch our own line of like graduated cylinders and
beakers for you guys okay so this is where things get a little bit
trickier yeah we're gonna have to run it for a little bit to kind of kick some of
these bubbles out of here okay so so far we've put in what 1300
mils something like that oh no 1200. here we go ladies and gentlemen
uh well
no it's not nowadays
why did it stop and start again okay now we have water on our motherboard
the good news is i think the GPU backplate took the brunt of that
um that's only five mils
is there a way to all that is five mils
oh god this is going to take forever okay well
oh there we go beautiful okay funnel section the good news is we're close
does anyone still know how much water is in here
oh god i have to get all of that in there funnel me
okay okay it's a little smelly
um so do you want to do just a little bit at first and should we do you want
to turn the system off how do you guys want to do this what's going to give us
max effect here this is the big moment
oh that is super cool
okay here we go
are you getting this andy get a close-up
i'm gonna give it another little jet here
okay i'm going i'm going for it now
that is freaking bright
oh that is so cool is the density of this one like uh
higher or something
but why is it sitting at the bottom like that it's time
oh look we spilled some
now that's an easy way to find a leak in your water cooling system
that is so cool
that is a very different effect isn't it
compared to when you have like a uv light and then a uv reactive additive in the
water because the the water itself
is what's glowing
that is crazy cool
now obviously constantly topping up your computer's
enzymes is not a very practical way to get it to light up not to mention that
once you've got micro particles whipping around in your loop
the damage to your CPU block is going to make the rust in our whole room water
cooling system look like a piece of cake but it's not like this is being sold as
an ek cryo fuel competitor so the good news for nyoka's plan
creating glow sticks is that for that use it might just be perfect in your
typical dollar store glow stick the chemicals used to create the light
effect are so nasty that it's probably a good thing that we couldn't find a
proper recipe in this classic episode of Channel Super Fun
and even worse to contain these chemicals very sturdy plastic is needed
so every time a glow stick gets cracked
it'll be bright and admittedly very fun for an hour or two
then it'll sit not breaking down for a
thousand years the bio-based fluid however is much less toxic i mean you
could take the contents of an ioka glow stick like this one and just dump it
afterwards or even drink it if you really wanted to and the plastic around
it is biodegradable too it's also even possible to use this method thank you to
create reusable glow sticks since you can just flush the glow solution down
the drain and fill it again to recharge it now admittedly these glow sticks aren't
cost effective at the moment but this technology has the potential to scale
really well and glow sticks are just one example of the type of reaction that can
be made more sustainable using biotechnology everything from clothing
to pharmaceuticals to literal burgers can be made in this fashion haha um i
made you guys watch a science lecture disguised as a computer video gotcha and
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video and you like our more sciency-oriented content maybe check out our fusion reactor video they probably
actually made a fair bit of progress since we made that but it's still really cool