George Church’s Harvard lab is one of the most celebrated fonts of innovation in the world of life sciences. George’s earliest work on the Human Genome Project arguably pre-dated the actual start of that project.
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Much of George’s most recent and celebrated work has been with a transformationally powerful gene-editing technique called CRISPR, which he co-invented. George and I discuss CRISPR and its jarring ramifications throughout this week’s edition of the After on Podcast.
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We begin by discussing genetic sequencing. “Sequencing” is a fancy (and rather cool way) of saying, “reading.”
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George and I next discuss gene editing. As the word suggests, editing the genome of a person, bacterium, or virus involves changing some of its letters.
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The third thing we discuss is DNA synthesis. Specifically, the creation of relatively small, customized units called “oligos.” These are short sequences of DNA, which typically run from a couple dozen letters to a couple hundred letters long.
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Our fourth topic is DNA assembly. This is the process of stringing those oligos together into long strands.
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So that’s the table of contents of the first half of our interview: Sequencing, editing, synthesis, and assembly. With those foundations in place, George and I then talk about the astounding things that this integrated set of rapidly improving, and mutual reinforcing fields are enabling.
Read full, original post: The astounding present and dizzying future of synthetic biology
