How much expensive lab equipment do you need to do something like this?
"A quick lil CRISPR switch" sounds like "oh just my homemade fusion reactor hooked up to my kitchen warp drive" to me, yet you make it sound so simple!
You can do this on your desk, or better yet at your local diy bio hackerspace. Validating it takes some equipment, e.g. for PCR, but that's commonly available.
Eh, other than the electroporator I could probably do it for about $100-$200 bucks of equipment if I had a decent kitchen.
Reagents probably about $300, but you can use em in a bunch of reactions, in aggregate down to like $50.
The fundamentals of biology are really cheap, but the skills to actually do it are really expensive. It’s way more manual than you imagine - like how my thumb moves. The equipment is way more fundamentally basic than you imagine: the only thing you can’t 3d print and build from off-the-shelf stuff is the instant pot I use for media prep
"A quick lil CRISPR switch" sounds like "oh just my homemade fusion reactor hooked up to my kitchen warp drive" to me, yet you make it sound so simple!