
Ginkgo Bioworks to purchase 100M base pairs of DNA from Twist Bioscience - bcanton
http://www.fastcompany.com/3053065/most-creative-people/twist-bioscience-inks-deal-to-sell-100-million-pairs-of-synthetic-dna
======
bcanton
I'm one of the founders of Ginkgo (YCS14). I posted some comments on the
technical details of the DNA synthesis business here -
[http://blog.ginkgobioworks.com/2015/11/04/comments-on-
gene-s...](http://blog.ginkgobioworks.com/2015/11/04/comments-on-gene-
synthesis-in-light-of-our-deal-with-twist/)

~~~
adenadel
Hi Barry, how do you guys know that this accounts for 10% of global DNA
synthesis production? Some companies synthesize their own DNA with custom
instruments and my guess would be that this production is unaccounted for.

~~~
skosuri
Perhaps they mean synthetic genes from the major market players. It's
definitely not 10% of all DNA synthesis. For example, oligos produced on
microarrays alone can produce this much DNA on a single chip. I'm assuming
they mean assembled, sequence verified DNA. For that, I'm not sure where they
are getting their numbers.

~~~
adenadel
I assumed that they meant unique sequence. The oligo pools for microarrays
really only need to be synthesized a single time and a single oligo can be
present multiple times. Synthesizing 100M bp is really trivial if you amplify
any bit of DNA :)

~~~
skosuri
I wasn't talking about copies of the same sequence. Agilent for instance makes
1M oligo arrays, and you can get these at 200nt each with arbitrary sequence.
That's 200M bp of synthetic DNA spec'd to design on a single chip.

