DNA synthesis was put on the conveyor
Americans have started selling serial DNAmembrana
Artificially engineered DNA on a serial (by industry standards) scale began to be sold by the newly created American company Ginkgo BioWorks.
This innovation promises a gradual transfer to the industrial rails of not just biotechnologies, but their youngest part – synthetic biology. This science is aimed at many practical sectors – from the search and industrial production of new drugs to the production of biofuels. To put it simply, it is a mixture of genetic engineering with selection, flavored with the possibility of synthesizing fundamentally new genetic sequences from organic compounds. It is considered as the next step of genetic engineering in general, since it is not just about improving organisms, but about actually constructing new ones.
The company Ginkgo BioWorks was founded by five scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who ate a dog on manipulations with DNA. They note that currently a large number of both fundamental and purely applied research related to genetic engineering and synthetic biology are hindered by fairly routine procedures for the production of new genetic sequences, which are then introduced into organisms (usually bacteria), then producing the necessary proteins or other compounds.
Ginkgo BioWorks is not the first to try to sell DNA to order, but the first that intends to bring the technology of production of genetic codes to standardized rails.
Scientists use specialized enzymes to break down and stitch together pieces of genetic codes. Now in institutes and companies, this part of the work is performed by laboratory technicians or graduate students. And things are not moving too fast, especially if you need to get hundreds of slightly different versions of the code for experiments. In addition, each time they apply their own methods and subtleties that are not suitable for other cases.
The situation is reminiscent of the dawn of the automotive industry, when a handful of craftsmen manually turned out original parts and manually assembled a car that will never be exactly repeated. It was then that accurate drawings with tolerances, standard parts for the whole industry, and mass production of passenger cars on the conveyor appeared. Ginkgo BioWorks intends to make a similar revolution in biotechnology.
One of the founders of the company, Tom Knight, together with several colleagues from MIT, in 2003 developed a technology for standardized crosslinking of DNA blocks called "biobricks" (BioBrick). Each such "brick" is responsible for the synthesis of a certain protein and is equipped with connector molecules at both ends, which make it easy to connect the "bricks" together, like Lego elements. According to Knight, the "bricks" principle allows you to standardize and automate the code assembly process.
Moreover, such standardization will allow different scientific groups to design and create original code fragments, and third parties, for example, to quickly bring them together in one organism.
Therefore, the premises of the new company are filled with machines for conducting polymerase chain reaction (they change the temperature in flasks according to a given algorithm), robotic manipulators for handling reagents and similar equipment.
"Think of it as rapid prototyping in biology. We make parts, test them, and then connect them," explains Reshma Shetty, another of the founders of Ginkgo BioWorks. "Now you can spend more time thinking about the design (of the organism), rather than the hard work of producing the right DNA."
Potential buyers of serial synthetic DNA are industrial chemical and pharmaceutical companies, as well as academic institutions. For one of the private customers, Ginkgo BioWorks, for example, made a complex code made up of 15 genes and having a length of 30 thousand bases. The function of this code is not disclosed.
Source: Technology Review, Startup That Builds Biological Parts
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru06.10.2009