From synthetic biology’s earliest days, DNA synthesis, and more specifically gene synthesis, has been touted as the central, enabling technology of the field.  Gene synthesis is part of what lets us make the leap from the ad hoc, cut and paste of genetic engineering to the systematic design that is [or will be] the hallmark [...]

In a previous post, I discussed different platforms for organism engineering that were presented at SB5.0. Here I’ll try to give a high-level picture of Ginkgo’s pipeline for organism engineering. If you’ve checked out our webpage, you’ll see that we have several different organism engineering projects happening at Ginkgo that span several different hosts. Our [...]

Synthetic biology 5.0 wrapped up a couple weeks ago and attending the conference reinforced for me that the field has developed sufficiently over the past few years that we are now seeing different platforms and/or schools of thought in how to engineer organisms start to coalesce. Chris Voigt gave a nice talk about how his [...]

There have been a couple interesting papers out recently that, in my mind, point towards where synthetic biology is going. The first, by Travis and co. from Chris’s lab, combined available genomic data with gene synthesis to make and screen a library of methyl halide transferases. Methyl halide transferases convert S-adenoyl methionine (SAM – a [...]

In 2003, Tom Knight published a technical report on a standard for physical composition of genetic parts. He called parts that adhered to the standard BioBricks. Tom’s key innovation is to design a standard that enabled any two parts (that adhered to the standard) to be assembled together. All of a sudden, this meant that [...]

At Ginkgo, we think that having the right CAD tools will be invaluable in improving our ability to engineer biological systems.  As Tom likes to put, we need “push tools” that will let you put in a proposed design and then tell you all the mistakes you made during the design.  (To hear Tom’s take [...]

John Cumbers recently asked the BioBricks list about how best to run a ligation reaction. Based on the literature and the experience in my lab, here is what we have found works well – …stick with the normal NEB ligase buffer. Make sure it still has DTT and ATP (not too many freeze/thaw cycles of [...]