Why don’t we use DNA for more things? It’s fairly strong for its size, with some redundant error-checking built right in, and its simple code lets us design strands that act in all sorts of innovative ways. We’ve talked about injecting DNA into sufferers of heart disease to travel through the blood to a damaged area, bind, and self-assemble into a controllable bio-stent that would prop open blood vessels. We’ve talked about storing huge amounts of data in microscopic packages of curled up DNA strands. We’ve talked about using DNA to micro-suture internal lacerations. We’ve talked about creating artificial life forms with custom genomes. We’ve talked and talked, and precious little of it has come to pass.
The major reason for this is that it’s just too difficult to make DNA. We can design all the bio-stents we like, do all the research necessary to target them, and design specific counter-measures to take them out should they start doing things we don’t expect. None of it matters, though, if we can’t make the strand in question. Our abilities in sequence-reading have been improving along an exponential curve since pretty much the day we published the molecule’s structure, and in that time we’ve made our reading about a hundred thousand times more efficient. It used to cost about $0.01 to sequence a base pair; now it costs about $0.0000001. Synthesis, on the other hand, used to cost about $3 per base pair; now it costs roughly $0.50.
This week, though, a talk by Cambrian Genomics at a DARPA-funded event brought widespread attention to a technology that promises to make DNA synthesis thousands of times cheaper, potentially offering the first real price drop the process has ever seen.
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