Tag Archives: inertia

Latest JBEI Startup to Speed Up Biotech Industry

TeselaGen’s DNA construction technology makes genetic engineering cheaper and faster.

Sequencing, splicing and expressing DNA may seem to be the quintessence of cutting-edge science—indeed DNA manipulation has revolutionized fields such as biofuels, chemicals and medicine. But in fact, the actual process can still be tedious and labor-intensive, something Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Nathan Hillson learned the hard way.

After struggling for two days to design a protocol to put together a genetic circuit with 10 pieces of DNA—using a spreadsheet as his primary tool—he was dismayed to discover that an outside company could have done the whole thing, including parts and labor, for lower cost than him ordering the oligonucleotides himself. “I learned two things: one, I never wanted to go through that process again, and two, it’s extremely important to do the cost-effectiveness calculation,” said Hillson, a biochemist who also directs the synthetic biology program at the Berkeley Lab-led Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “So that was the genesis of the j5 software. This is the perfect thing to teach a computer to do.” (more…)

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