J. D. Kittle - Coda genomics

• CODA (Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly), also incorporates its patented Translation Engineering ^TM into the design of the gene.

John Danner - Codon Devices

• Mission: to eliminate construction as a barrier to synthetic biology (Drew’s point #4).
• Key enabling technologies: CAD design environment -> multiplexed oligo synthesis & purification -> assembly…
• The bottom line is that if you want to go bigger with synthesis, you’ve got to multiplex. For instance, you can get a large number of variants (for cents/bp) if you design a library well. Instead of doing blind mutagenesis, lets use the knowledge we have! Codon’s BioFAB(tm) will make length concerns a non-issue in synthesis.

Hans Buegl - GeneArt

• The market for customers of synthesis tech. has doubled in the last year, and is split nearly into thirds between Big Pharma, academic/research institutions, and ?
• Largest synthesis ~21kb. They have software which attempts to select the optimal codon distribution by examaning and scoring each codon in turn in a given sequence.
• They’ve optimized the synthesis workflow with lots of automation.

Jeremy Minshull - DNA 2.0 (president)

• Gene Designer is a free program for optimizing codon usage for different organisims (but requires registration).

Questions:
What are the current bottlenecks in synthesis? Cost of synthesis, cost of sequencing (consider personal genome project), and perhaps surprisingly time required for synthesis. As Drew pointed out, a “compile time” of at least four to eight weeks is completely impractical, especially for students in a competition. But what market pressures exist to drive down the time required? What will spur innovation here?