Re: [DIYbio] Purchasing DNA synthesizer

Great that DNA writing is popping up again. It's so foundational yet has received so much less attention than reading DNA. This said, making gene-length fragments is pretty standard and inexpensive these days and is offered by a spectrum of commercial groups. I don't recommend doing it at home/garage/etc if you're planning on working with proteins or short metabolic pathways just because of the economics. Your time and money are better spent on protein/metabolic engineering etc. Also, if you're planning on using older, organic chemistries to make DNA, keep in mind the chemicals required and waste products produced are not great to have around your home or garage. You may want to explore newer enzymatic-based chemistries coming online that are much greener. The idea of a chip-based oligo assembler has been around for a while but to my knowledge no one has been able to get it to work well -- it would be great to have this revisited, but I still would have the oligos pre-synthesized and focus mainly on getting the assembly processes working well. Note that chip-based foundry systems and chip-based test and measurement systems are getting a lot of attention these days. I point people to these two papers to get a sense of where things stand -- Venter's recent review of synbio -- pay particular attention to Figure 4, which describes Avery bio's chip-based DNA synthesis system -- and Roswell's description of their Molecular Electronic chip -- a general purpose, single molecule sensing platform. The problem of making long DNA assemblies necessary for synthetic genomes has not yet been solved. My baseline is E. coli K12 from ATCC, which retails for $400. The genome is about 4.5 megabases. At current synthesis prices, about $0.10 base, K12 would be a $450,000 print job. When it's $450 to print the genome -- and we have base-level control of the entire chromosome -- no one will order the microbe from ATCC again. I look forward to this day.