Photoshop for DNA

pafischer writes "Forbes is reporting on a Biotech startup company trying to make DNA manipulation as easy as Photoshop. From the article: 'The goal is to move from having to merely tweak the proteins that are used as biotech drugs to being able to design them, even taking material from multiple organisms and using them to create new, functional genes.'"

Comments

bad article summary from bad article title

[geoffspear]

The title of the linked article is the only part that even mentions Photoshop. Nowhere in the article does anyone claim that the process would be as easy as using Photoshop, or any other software programming.

They do compare the advance in genetic manipulation to the difference between editing with Wite-Out and editing with a word processor, but that's what we call an analogy. They're not claiming that producing genes would be something anyone with no training can do with their home computer.

Re:bad article summary from bad article title

[Otter]

What the company seems to do is this:

Currently, it's easy to 1) amplify large chunks of DNA verbatim and 2) change individual nucleotides. What is difficult is making large blocks of novel or heavily modified sequence, as it's expensive or impossible to synthesize them from nucleotides. Codon Devices seems to have a way to generate large chunks of customized sequence.

How important that turns out to be, we'll see, but the company does have some really smart people behind it. Anyway, that's how I understand it to work -- feel free to contribute a better analogy.

Re:bad article summary from bad article title

[Rich0]

Being able to make long synthetic DNA sequences would be immensely valuable. Right now practicality limits synthtic DNA to less than 100 bases. Genes are kilobases long even in bacteria. You need megabases for animals if you want to keep the introns intact (scary - a single animal gene can approach an entire bacterial genome in length).

What the article lacks is one critical detail - how exactly they plan on doing all this.

Imagine I started a new company designed to revolutionize computing, pointing out that your measly PC can only run at a few GHz, and I'll make them run at a few THz. Sure, that's great to say, but it would be nice to at least suggest how exactly one plans on going about this...