Faster, cheaper, better: A new way to synthesize DNA

In the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, in which organisms can be engineered to do things like decompose plastic and manufacture biofuels and medicines, production of custom DNA sequences is a fundamental tool for scientific discovery. Yet the process of DNA synthesis, which has remained virtually unchanged for more than 40 years, can be slow and unreliable. Now in what could address a critical bottleneck in biology research, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), announced they have pioneered a new way to synthesize DNA sequences through a creative use of enzymes that promises to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate. The discovery, led by JBEI graduate students Sebastian Palluk and Daniel Arlow, was published in Nature Biotechnology in a paper titled “De novo DNA Synthesis Using Polymerase-Nucleotide Conjugates.” “DNA synthesis is at the core of everything we try to do when we build biology,” said JBEI CEO Jay Keasling, the corresponding author on the paper and also a Berkeley Lab senior faculty scientist. “Sebastian and Dan have created what I think will be the best way to synthesize DNA since [Marvin] Caruthers invented solid-phase DNA synthesis almost 40 years ago. What this means for science is that we can engineer biology much less expensively – and in new ways – than we would have been able to do in the past.” (Read more)

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