Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts

TechReviewAl writes "A new startup called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts, such as strings of specific genes, for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight, also a research scientist at MIT, says: 'I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"

Comments

I'm ready to place my order

[Anonymous Coward]

5' 5", 110lbs, female, further details can be found in attached magazine. Do you give volume discounts?

Re:I'm ready to place my order

[SlashWombat]

By "volume discounts" I hope you don't mean if she turns out to be 250lbs, you don't have to pay as much?

Building blocks

[cjfs]

The key innovation of the BioBrick assembly standard is that a biological engineer can assemble any two BioBrick parts, and the resulting composite object is itself a BioBrick part that can be combined with any other BioBrick parts.

Sounds great in theory. In reality, you'll always be missing one of those stupid little yellow bricks and they won't sell them individually.

Re:Does this mean... cyborgs?

[Rand310]

Oh, and by the way, if there are any ambitious young coders who want to revolutionize bioengineering, all you have to do is write some decent software which can objectively navigate the complicated but exceedingly logical rules of basic cloning. Someone who could write a program with a nice GUI where you just dragged around genes along a plasmid backbone, told it what organism you're to be working in, and have it spit out the plasmid one should use, the oligos & primers needed to be ordered, along with the enzymes to be used could enable a lot of time to be saved in the lab and make a lot of synthetic biology MUCH more accessible. It's a simple kind of code. Great fun for the programming mind. But the current software is god-awful, and exceedingly limited.