Programming biology: How gene synthesis will lead to a host of medical and drug innovations

Credit: Jaedoo Lee, New York Times
Credit: Jaedoo Lee, New York Times

As a customer, you can visit the Twist website, upload a spreadsheet with the DNA sequence that you want, select a quantity and pay for it with a credit card. After a few days, the DNA is delivered to your laboratory door. At that point, you can insert the synthetic DNA into cells and get them to begin making — hopefully — the target molecules that the DNA is coded to produce. 

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Twist is one of a number of companies selling synthetic genes, betting on a future filled with bioengineered products with DNA as their building blocks.

In a way, that future has arrived. Gene synthesis is behind two of the biggest “products” of the past year: the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. 

Now companies and scientists look toward a post-Covid future when gene synthesis will be deployed to tackle a variety of other problems. If the first phase of the genomics revolution focused on reading genes through gene sequencing, the second phase is about writing genes.

Crispr, the gene-editing technology whose inventors won a Nobel Prize last year, has received far more attention, but the rise of gene synthesis promises to be an equally powerful development.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.

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