
Beyond the $1K Genome: DNA ‘Writing’ Comes Next - jonbaer
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/18/beyond-the-1k-genome-dna-writing-comes-next-2/
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hyperbovine
> Illumina hit the $1,000 mark in January of 2014.

Everyone I know (admittedly small sample size) is still paying around
$2000-3000 for 30x WGS. Does the $1000 genome actually exist, or is this just
pure PR on Illumina's part? What is BGI charging nowadays?

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aroch
If you own your own Illumina, you can arguably get everything done for
~$1200-1400 with current chemistry, which gets better and cheaper with each
iteration. We've also tested Oxford Nanopore's minION, which has probably the
best chances of truly cheap sequencing bit that comes at the expense of
accuracy.

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toufka
At 10¢/bp, that's <$100/gene for most averaged-sized proteins. That price
range makes producing _novel_ proteins competitively priced over the tedious
effort of stitching up chimeras from preexisting templates. Scientifically
there's a lot that can be done if you can order proteins from scratch rather
than having to scrounge around and copy/paste from what you already have
access to. However, that de novo synthesis is currently only economically
accessible to very few scientists/companies.

This new cheap synthesis will effectively make economical the 'writing of new
code' rather than the current state of 'copy and paste from github, with a
couple of minor modifications', and will bring commensurate advances to the
industry. This will drop a significant barrier to the progress of synthetic
biology and its downstream uses.

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toufka
Twist just raised their series C at $37M (~80M total) [1]. Emily (the author)
is their CEO.

[1] [http://boston.citybizlist.com/article/275318/fidelity-
manage...](http://boston.citybizlist.com/article/275318/fidelity-management-
joins-37m-series-c-for-twist-bioscience)

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kctess5
How does that math near the end work out?

If there are 3B bp in the human genome, then the write the whole thing for
$1000 it should be $3.3e-7, which is a whole lot less than the quoted $0.02.

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fabian2k
The comparison is rather confusing because this article is not about
synthesizing genomes, but individual genes. The $0.02 seems to be just a
somewhat arbitrary number at which DNA synthesis isn't a large cost factor
anymore.

The genes that are typically ordered are a few thousand nucleotides long,
synthesizing the whole genome would be an absolutely monumental effort and
probably out of reach for now. The largest artificially synthesized genome was
done by Craig Venter and that had only about a million base pairs.

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kctess5
Interesting, thanks!

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dluan
Writing is only a small step, the real goal is virtualization. Also, with
tools like crispr, writing is not as big of a problem, per se.

Though really, if parallelization is the method maybe a cool benchmark would
be sequencing a whole genome and then reprinting it, all while you're out for
lunch or coffee.

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lvs
I don't think you know what a CRISPR is. It doesn't have anything to do with
DNA synthesis.

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w1ntermute
Lol and the GP is a cofounder of Experiment (YC W13), "an online community and
a crowdfunding platform for scientific research." You really have to wonder
how much due diligence YC does on its biotech founders.

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dluan
I actually ask that question myself all the time :)

