The state of DNA synthesis is a bit like humanity’s journey to the moon—just because something has been achieved before doesn’t mean we should cease figuring out how to do it better.”

That is how Harold P. de Vladar, PhD, founder and CEO of synthetic DNA provider Ribbon Biolabs, sees the vast opportunity in the DNA synthesis space. de Vladar says that the DNA synthesis equivalent to the Apollo 11 moon landing was J. Craig Venter’s landmark work on assembling the 5,386-bp bacteriophage FX174 from short single strands of synthetic, commercially available DNA known as oligonucleotides. Venter and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute built the FX174 genome using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) adaptation called polymerase cycle assembly. The feat occurred in 2002–2003—just after the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s.

Venter showed that long DNA could be synthesized, but he also confirmed that doing so was difficult. “When I was still a researcher,” de Vladar recalled, “I confronted the problem of making long DNA. I wanted to synthesize a library of small phage genomes, around 4,000 bp, and that was an impossible project. I wanted like 250 sequences, and this was unachievable.”

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[Genenews,2023.7.11, https://www.genengnews.com/topics/omics/when-long-synthetic-dna-is-needed-in-short-order/]