De novo DNA synthesis

As of 2018, Ciro Santilli believes that this could be the next big thing in biology technology.

"De novo" means "starting from scratch", that is: you type the desired sequence into a computer, and the synthesize it.

The "de novo" part is important, because it distinguishes this from the already well solved problem of duplicating DNA from an existing DNA template, which is what all our cells do daily, and which can already be done very efficiently in vitro with polymerase chain reaction.

Many startup companies are attempting to create more efficient de novo synthesis methods:

Notably, the dream of most of those companies is to have a machine that sits on a lab bench, which synthesises whatever you want.

TODO current de novo synthesis costs/time to delivery after ordering a custom sequence.

The initial main applications are likely going to be:

polymerase chain reaction primers (determine which region will be amplified
creating a custom sequence to be inserted in a plasmid, i.e. artificial gene synthesis

but the real pipe dream is building and bootstraping entire artificial chromosomes

News coverage:

2023-03 twitter.com/sethbannon/status/1633848116154880001
AnsaBio created the world's longest DNA oligo produced using de novo synthesis! 1,005 bases! 99.9% stepwise yield
2020-10-05 www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0695-9 "Enzymatic DNA synthesis enters new phase"

Video 6. Nuclera eDNA enzymatic de novo DNA synthesis explanatory animation (2021) Source. The video shows nicely how Nuclera's enzymatic DNA synthesis works:

they provide blocked nucleotides of a single type
add them with the enzyme. They use a werid DNA polymerase called terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase that adds a base at a time to a single stranded DNA strand rather than copying from a template
wash everything
do deblocking reaction
and then repeat until done

De novo DNA synthesis

 Ancestors

 Incoming links