Re: [DIYbio] Extremely cheap gene synthesis

From: Anselm Levskaya <levskaya@gmail.com>
To: "diybio@googlegroups.com" <diybio@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Sep 4, 2012 16:33:14 EDT
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] Extremely cheap gene synthesis

Hey all,

This industry is my bread and butter:

The cheapest "gene" synthesis that you can actually get on the market
costs $0.20/bp as linear 500bp fragments from IDT.  It's not clonally
purified but is sequenced as a pool to eliminate pool-wide errors.  On
a good day the net error rate is somewhere between 1/500 to 1/1000.
Turn-around time: ~1-2 weeks.

The cheapest clonally pure DNA is obtainable from a variety of chinese
companies (genscript, etc.) for $0.35/bp.  It's not guaranteed they'll
actually be able to synthesize what you send them, and often they'll
fail, but they only charge on successful synthesis.  Turnaround time:
4-6 weeks.

DNA2.0 (california) offers the strongest guarantees of turnaround time
at ~5-7days.  However the cost for the service is upwards of $0.80/bp.
 They're pretty good at making most things though.

No company has yet delivered to the public marketplace a next-gen
synthesis product with acceptable error rates.  Gen9 and Cambrian
Genomics (my company) are the only startups that are even tackling the
problem.  Calling it a solved problem is hyperbolic at this point,
though I hope that some real progress will be made over the next year
or two in bringing a solution to the general market.

(The problem with microarray pool amplification is that you have to
make oligos at such a high redundancy level on the array that the
per-oligo pricing starts looking a lot less competitive to
high-throughput bulk phosphoramidite synthesis in plates.)

-A

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