Amino only covers the next step; growing your bacteria.
The kit comes with a single, "living nightlight", sample that you can grow. They also plan to offer additional samples ("Apps"...) that you can buy. As far as tinkering, it sounds like the only intended modification is to the growth liquid: grow in water vs grow in liquid-X.
The company they're working with, Synbiota, does have a "DNA Tinker Studio" kit that looks interesting. It's not full synthesis either though. It contains specific set of available 'parts' to work with, that you combine and get existing bacteria to take up.
There are services, not difficult to find, that offer actual digital->DNA synthesis. Current state, they are expensive, and are focused-on/able-to create only relatively short sequences. Sequence->Modify->Synthesize->Grow, or even targeted splicing, aren't really available things yet, AFAIK.
Here here- this potentially offers a huge amount but is vague enough to offer all the promise of a childhood chemistry kit bundled with the realisation on unwrapping that you've been sold up the river with overhyped claims.
How hard would it be to generate your own dms sewuences? Could you order genes with appropriate restriction end points and insert that? Does the kit actually perform all transformation and selection automatically?
One of the nice things about bacteria/yeast is that once you've booted up your app, you can collect a sample, store it, and then re-grow it in the future. As long as you have growth media, an app could result in a lifetime of joy.
More info and some examples of what people are programming cells to do: https://goo.gl/lfweYy
It should be pointed out that most US-based oligo synthesis companies will screen orders for potentially "dangerous" sequences. I recall watching an IDT (idtdna.com) video on CRISPR that brought this to light.
As far as I can tell from the Indiegogo video, Amino appears to be a simple bioreactor that includes competent cells + some sort of plasmid to express genes related to bioluminescence -- am I missing anything else? Pretty compact and neat; I would have loved to play with one of these as a child.
That's probably one of the worst ways of phrasing that, but they have a point.
I'm in love with biohacking and trying to start a biohackerspace myself in my city, but if we're reaching the level of actually making modifications to organisms at home, we really need to have a serious talk about it. Life is not a toy, it's self-replicating nanotech that's literally capable of killing people at scale.
It may be a snarky comment but the potential is there.
When diy-biology gets going international drug smuggling rings are going to be a thing of the past, you're going to have a strain of e. Drugi that can produce your cocaine or heroin. The world hasn't even began to think of the possibilities, both good and bad, that are potentially around the corner
To me the ideal biolab is: digital genome data in, organism(s) out.
I know this isn't promising that, but I want to understand how close it is to full DNA synthesis.