A Genome in a Day
September 4, 2018 | Terry Sharrer
In living cells, a special polymerase named “terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase” (TdT) adds about a thousand nucleotides per second to a DNA chain. In machine synthesizers adding one C,T,G,or C nucleotide takes about three minutes. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have figured out how to join nucleotides and the TdT polymerase to speed up the synthesis to about one base in ten seconds. Imagining this process in a “DNA printer,” these synthetic biologists suppose an entire genome could be completed in a day’s time. MORE
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