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New Technique Could Speed Up DNA Synthesis

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-06-20 04:39:58
Science

New technique could help scientists create a gene in just 1 day [sciencemag.org]

Creating a new gene in a single day could soon be possible, thanks to a new technique that mimics the way the body copies its own DNA. Though the technology needs to clear a few more hurdles, it could one day let researchers speedily rewrite microbe genes, enabling them to synthesize new medicines and fuels on the fly.

[...] Church says the new approach is not quite ready to dethrone conventional DNA synthesis. So far, the group has made oligos only 10 bases long. And there are still a few writing problems, as the approach was only 98% accurate at writing DNA in the desired sequence, below the 99% accuracy of the traditional approach. "It's cool for a first demonstration," Palluk says. "But it's not quite there yet."

In order to write oligos up to 1000 bases long, the approach will likely need to be 99.9% accurate. If it gets there, Church says it could help revolutionize not just synthetic biology's efforts to write and test new genes, but also enable efforts to write massive libraries of data in DNA [sciencemag.org] to create a compact archive the firehoses of information coming from giant science projects such as astronomy surveys, which could then be fished out and read out later.

Also at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [lbl.gov].

De novo DNA synthesis using polymerase-nucleotide conjugates [nature.com] (DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4173) (DX [doi.org])


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