DNA Manufacturing
Photo via flickr by net_efekt
Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic-biology startup, aims to make biological engineering easier than baking bread. Founded by five MIT scientists, the company offers to assemble biological parts—such as strings of specific genes—for industry and academic scientists.
While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways.
“Think of it as rapid prototyping in biology—we make the part, test it, and then expand on it,” says Reshma Shetty, one of the company’s co-founders. Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch. For example, a very simple project, such as assembling two pieces of DNA, might cost $100, with prices increasing from there.
In an interview with Sputnik Observatory, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson discussed the possibilities of designing with DNA:
Every biochemical lab has these machines that you just press the buttons and you make a piece of DNA according to whatever particular sequence you want. Then you run it through the PCR and you have a trillion molecules of that kind. Then you can manipulate those, clone them into a bacterium or whatever you want to do. So you have a colony of bacteria carrying this particular stretch of DNA that you want. They will then manufacture the proteins that you can design yourself. So that’s what makes it so promising – that you can start at the bottom with a single molecule and produce a whole colony of bugs doing whatever chemistry you want them to do. It looks like the right way to go. It’s certainly a lot easier than trying to make tiny little tools and mechanically construct things. You’re using God’s technology rather than ours.