What kind of lab equipment and tools would be needed and is there any open science oriented resource on the process?
That really depends on your budget.
What you need is a plasmid (a peace of DNA) with all of the machinery needed for cobalamin production on it. You can do in-silico modeling to get the plasmid sequence but then you will need to make it. In order to make a plasmid you can either do all the wetwork yourself, which requires a lot of equipment and reagents or you can pay a company to synthesize do it for you.
Once you have a plasmid the rest if pretty straightforward: get the plasmid into bacteria (can be done with ice and calcium salts), get the bacteria into a container with sterile media (a fancy chicken broth with salts) and let them rip :)
Finally, you will need to isolate your cobalamin form the used media, but you’ll need to look into that, I haven’t done it before (filtration and fractioning most likely) ;)
If you need specific guidance on the process and materials to do it at home then look into biohacking and DIY Science communities, maybe there is even a physical one somewhere nearby if you are lucky! ;)
Good luck and take care!
peace of DNA
☮️🧬
I googled “cobalamin bacteria” and I found this paper about the exact topic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8123684/
It’s fairly high level, but it’s a good starting point. I only skimmed it but I don’t think it covers how to actually build a bioreactor. I’m sure there’s info on how to do that out there already, but maybe not for this specific process.

