 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 military vehicle combat game that's free to play and a ton of fun. Try it out for free down below today and get some special bonus items for signing up. Let's go back in time to before the anglerfish came to life though. Today we're joined by the fine folks from Nyoka 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 Gossia princeps, a deep sea crustacean 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 Nyoka 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, 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 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, hold on, I've got my luciferase, and I've got my luciferin. I want my luciferin. I'm going to take 100 microliters of this. They don't believe I can do it properly. I know it. I'm going to go down to the first stop. Slowly drop back up. Wow, look at that. The system works. It's right at the mark. 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. Watch this. Oh, wow. You can actually see it's working already. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry. I got this. I got this. 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? It'll glow over heat, right? That makes sense. Enzymes. See, I remember a couple of things from, 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, whoa. Okay. So let's just get some oxygen into it. No, no, don't worry. I'm not going to. I wasn't going to do that. Okay. But now we're probably have more oxygen in the air in here. So we shake it. Do we get a brighter glow? Yeah, hard to say. There it goes. So good for you. You made an unhealthy P-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. 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 going to see that if we if we kept this completely still, 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. That's cool. You can see where it's kind of seeping down into it. 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 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 great for drinking out of. All right. Got to use. We'll use your flask. This one is a pipette. Just pour it in till the 25 millimeter mark. 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. Let me crank it. Oh, my God. Oh, that is so cool. So then conceivably, if you wanted to make like a leader of this, you could just you could do that. Yeah. This one lasts about 20 minutes. OK. 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 in the reaction, 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. We're also engineering the actual enzyme to work better for a long lasting glow reaction. Right. Because it's never been done before. Right. So we're only seeing glow times that are really, really long, like beyond five hours. But now we're working to make it brighter and more awesome. Got it. I guess they 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. 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. Hit me with maybe like 300 mils this time. We're going to we're going to launch our own line of like graduated cylinders and beakers and you guys. OK. So this is where things get a little bit trickier. Yeah, we're going to have to run it for a little bit to kind of kick some of these bubbles out of here. OK, so so far we've put in what, 1300 mils, something like that. Oh, no, 1200. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Well, no, it's not. Now it is. Why did it stop and start again? OK, 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 that? All that is five mils. Oh, God, this is going to take forever. OK. Oh, there we go. Beautiful. OK. Funnelception. The good news is we're close. Does anyone still know how much water is in here? Just approximately. Oh, God, I have to get all of that in there. Funnel me. OK. OK. It's a little smelly. 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. OK, here we go. You getting this, Andy? Get a close up. I'm going to give it another little jet here. OK, 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 higher or something? It's starting to mix with the fuel going next to it. But why is it sitting at the bottom like that? It's time. Look, we spilled some. Now that's an easy way to find a leak in your water cooling system. Oh, my God. 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 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 rest 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 an IOKA'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 Superfund. 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. Ha ha. I made you guys watch a science lecture disguised as a computer video. Gotcha. And now it's over. For this message from our sponsor, War Thunder. War Thunder is a free to play online military vehicle combat game. It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S and X with cross play. It's from 34 million players from all over the world and it features an incredible arsenal of more than 1700 historically accurate playable tanks, aircrafts, and ships from the 1930s all the way to the 1990s. You can participate in massive combined arms battles on over 80 major battlefields from World War II to the end of the Cold War. And there's always active development. There's free major updates every couple of months to add even more content, including vehicles, maps, and new gameplay features. So head to the link below and start playing War Thunder for free. You'll also be able to get a free bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. If you guys enjoyed this video and you like our more sciencey oriented content, maybe check out our fusion reactor video. We probably actually made a fair bit of progress since we made that, but it's still really cool.