I’ve been working on a synthetic DNA assembly company. Basically, I figured out how to assemble DNA for people at a fraction of what it normally costs, so they give me a sequence, and then I make it in real life for them, then ship it to them.
Most of my customers have been AI protein designers, ironically. Turns out SOMEBODY has to wrangle atoms in the real biological world and that’s me!
After almost a year of work I finally smoothed out all the kinks in the process, so can now go from a design to synthetic DNA in a cell in about a week (not counting oligo pool synthesis time). I can do about 600,000bp per week, which is large enough to synthesize the smallest bacterial genome (each week), tho I only do about 1000bp fragments. I’m also completely bootstrapped and self funded, and only get help from my several opentrons robots
Most of my customers have been AI protein designers, ironically. Turns out SOMEBODY has to wrangle atoms in the real biological world and that’s me!
After almost a year of work I finally smoothed out all the kinks in the process, so can now go from a design to synthetic DNA in a cell in about a week (not counting oligo pool synthesis time). I can do about 600,000bp per week, which is large enough to synthesize the smallest bacterial genome (each week), tho I only do about 1000bp fragments. I’m also completely bootstrapped and self funded, and only get help from my several opentrons robots