Joshua ElkingtonFounder and General Partner at Axial

George Church on DNA synthesis

Name: George Church on DNA synthesis
Uploaded: 2024-05-01T16:00:05+00:00
Duration: 1 min
Channel: Joshua Elkington
Description: In this segment, Joshua Elkington reflects on the monumental challenge of achieving a billion‑fold improvement in DNA synthesis. He outlines three…

1 May 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, Joshua Elkington reflects on the monumental challenge of achieving a billion‑fold improvement in DNA synthesis. He outlines three strategic levers—miniaturization, multiplexing, and self‑assembly—while acknowledging that they are not a detailed recipe. He contrasts the current industry standard of phosphoramidite chemical synthesis, which adds a nucleotide in about three minutes even when parallelized, with the theoretical potential of polymerase‑based biochemical synthesis that could be up to 100,000 times faster. This speed advantage directly translates into dramatically lower costs, highlighting a key direction for future research and development in synthetic biology.

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[Speaker:JOSHUA_ELKINGTON] If you had asked me in 2003, or let's say at the beginning of that plot, how we were going to get a billionfold improvement, I might have said very glibly, miniaturization, multiplexing, and self-assembly. But that's not a recipe. If I had a recipe in the 1980s, things would be different. But roughly speaking, I'll give you an example that we are actively pursuing. Is right now DNA synthesis is done by organic chemistry, phosphoramidites. It takes 3 minutes to add a base. You can do many in parallel, but it takes 3 minutes to do each of those in parallel, while biochemistry polymerases can go up to 100,000 times faster than that. That's not a recipe, but it's an indication of where one can go. And that speed turns into cost.