- Early in the COVID-19 outbreak, maaku proposed that a DIYbio group could design and produce a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine using the same DNA-plasmid approach Inovio had publicized, which reportedly required only three hours to design and one month to manufacture.  
- yashgaroth, a bioprocess specialist, estimated that replicating Inovio’s plasmid DNA vaccine would cost ~US $15–20 k in reagents and equipment, take about three months to deliver gram-scale, endotoxin-clean plasmid, and would still require an electroporation device for effective in-vivo delivery.  
- The group debated the practicality and ethics of skipping large-scale safety testing; consensus was that the main downside of an untested DIY vaccine would likely be ineffectiveness rather than acute toxicity, although yashgaroth warned that live-virus challenge studies would demand BSL-3 containment beyond most community labs.  
- A pre-print on “in vivo multi-dimensional information-keeping in Halobacterium salinarum” (biorxiv.org/2020.02.14.949925) was shared as an example of advanced biological data-storage research relevant to long-term archiving and synthetic-biology memory systems.  
- nmz787 benchmarked ImplicitCAD and BRL-CAD for converting constructive-solid-geometry (CSG) models to STL, finding that high-resolution STL generation can take tens of hours even on 14-core machines, whereas BRL-CAD’s interactive viewer and slice-based ray-tracing are near-instant, highlighting STL’s inefficiency for large or precise geometries.  
- lsneff introduced the concept of “convergent assembly” for 3-D printing: fleets of small printers fabricate sub-blocks that robotic arms snap, peg, or glue together into large objects, potentially compressing print times from days to hours; fenn cautioned that cumulative geometric errors and calibration complexity remain major obstacles.