What is needed...

...

what do you mean

Do you want to use crispr? There are a lot of information you're leaving out.

I have no idea what crispr is. I have basic genetics knowledge learned from a genetics subject I had at uni few years ago.
So please, let me know what I need to learn and what I need to buy to be able to play with plants and make them grow differently.

...

holy fuck man you're at the base of a mountain and you want us to take you to the summit instantly

no, I want you to just describe my journey if I decide to climb the mountain.

You'd need years of training. It's nearly impossible to self-educate in this case because the amount of practice you would need would require millions in reagents. Plus, there are some skills that you're just better off learning from a master. Protocols are often ambiguous, or sub-optimal, and you're going to have questions .that Researchgate can't answer.

TLDR: time to go for a PhD.

I did a Master's degree that involved the generation of transgenic plants.
General equipment for microbiology:
- standard laboratory glassware (flasks, beakers, etc)
- plastics (pipettes + tips, containers, pietri dishes, etc)
- other general laboratory equipment (microcentrifuge, scale, water baths, refrigerator, etc)
- molecular biology equipment (gel station, PCR machine, nanodrop, water deonizer)
- a fume hood for working with chemicals and a flow hood for sterile culture
- an autoclave for sterilizing media and waste
- a whole bunch of enzymes and materials, including DNA synthesis and sequencing services

We're talking tens of thousands of dollars here, although you can get a lot of this stuff for free or very cheap if you know where to look (surplus university equipment, failed commercial labs that are auctioning off stuff or selling it for cheap)

Since you're generating transgenic plants, you'll need:
- agrobacteria
- e coli
- some place to grow your plants so that they don't escape into the wild

Since you're doing cell culture, you might need to use a fluorescent microscope or radiometric detection equipment (both of these would require a full-time staffer to maintain). If you ever need to purify proteins for some reason, you'll need an FPLC (these are tens of thousands of dollars alone).

Finally, you'll also need to deal with a bunch of legal regulations. I don't even know if an individual citizen would be allowed to make transgenic plants. Unless you have millions of dollars and you plan to hire your own full time staff, I don't think this is a feasible idea.

What are your thoughts on Zayner's "The Odin"?
Looks pretty legit to me, and not that expensive.
Also, couldn't you use a gene gun instead of agrobacterium?

ITT: OP makes a carnivorous tomato and dies

Thanks for the info.

For good work you currently need a huge amount of data. So you would need as many samples with data to run analytics (GWAS). That or you need to start running a large amount of controlled experiments.

This is why selective breeding works so well in comparison.

I'd imagine you wouldn't even want to do any of the labwork yourself economically. You would be entirely focused on data collection and trying to figure out the proper changes to make for whatever goal you have.

Basically the best course of action would be to open up test farms or gain samples from farms around the world depending on goal.

This is 20 seconds of thought. You would probably want to focus on something high value low mass/volume. So herbs/spices type of thing. Make it something "health conscious" that you can snakeoil sale. So just pick something with some supporting studies on a health benefit. Find whatever gives the health benefit and maximize it with selective breeding / GWAS / genetic sequencing to accelerate things.

This would still cost a lot of money and take forever. You would want to outsource all lab work and sequencing as much as possible.

Statistically I'm sure someone could crunch it and give an estimate on exact cost to boost the "snake oil health benefit thing" content by x%.

even then it's probably risky. So you would want to sell the company asap as a "genetic engineering" startup for as much money as possible.

I remember browsing DiyBio newsgroups and forums in 2007; back then, it consisted of people creating their own PCR machines or at the very most, doing undergraduate microbiology lab "experiments." "The Odin" seems to be exactly that, except packaged nicely.

> *There is a lot of surplus lab equipment in the US that becomes available to us. We take the best and toss the rest, testing and refurbishing. All equipment will come with a 3 month guarantee.

Hah, yeah, they're just taking stuff from universities and defunct labs and repackaging it. Still, you need a way to create primers and sequence stuff. Even if you did set up a home lab, you might be able to pay to use the services of a local university (i.e., sequencing, primer synthesis, mass spec, etc). Otherwise, you would have to use a commercial service. While individual primers and things are inexpensive (about $10 per primer and $5 per sequencing reaction), if you plan on doing this a lot, charges can quickly add up.

> Also, couldn't you use a gene gun instead of agrobacterium?
I suppose you could use a gene gun, but that requires culturing leaf discs and culturing them, as well as coating gold nanoparticles with DNA. Agrobacterial transformation is far simpler. At least with Arabidopsis, Agrobacterial transformations can be done just by dipping the flowers into a bacterial suspension and then selecting the seeds for your marker gene. But the method of transformation depends on the species that you are transforming; some species aren't susceptible to Agro.

I suppose that one thing you might be able to do at home would be to develop a transformation procedure for some species of plant that hasn't received much attention.