Thoughts from SynBioBeta: Customer Experiences with Complex DNA

If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend this year’s SynBioBeta meeting, I’d like to share some highlights from a panel discussion I moderated on behalf of Ansa Biotechnologies. The session focused on difficult- or impossible-to-obtain complex DNA sequences and how rapid access to high-quality DNA enables innovation across many existing and emerging applications. The panel was composed of several of Ansa’s early access customers, who discussed how new enzymatic DNA synthesis capabilities were, and will be, leveraged to move more quickly to the conclusions and advancements they are aggressively pursuing.

SynBioBeta was the perfect venue for this kind of conversation. Having attended this conference for only two years, I consider myself something of a newcomer. From this perspective, I was both surprised and impressed by the visionary nature of the talks and panel discussions. This event brings together key leaders across synthetic biology and stimulates important conversations about new technology and the many implications that will play out in the decades to come.

Those are issues we think about at Ansa as well. This company was founded by scientists who grew deeply frustrated with how rate-limiting legacy DNA synthesis techniques were to their own projects. So frustrated, in fact, that it compelled a pivot in their Ph.D. research goals and, subsequently, their long-term careers. The quest to eliminate the many limitations in synthesis and cloning started to become clearer as they conceived and created foundational proof-of-concept data for what has now become the most efficient and capable DNA synthesis technology on the planet. Over the last two years, we have scaled and developed the core platform to a point where it’s undeniably poised to have a major impact across synthetic biology.

Dozens of customers participating in our early access program have already seen how this can support their research, and we organized our SynBioBeta panel to showcase some of those customer experiences.

Our panel consisted of three early access customers — Olga Bielska from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Greg Lohman from New England Biolabs, and Jaymin Patel from the University of California, Berkeley — and we asked Tae Seok Moon from the J. Craig Venter Institute to round out the discussion from more of a visionary perspective. We hoped the SynBioBeta community would be interested in hearing about complex DNA challenges in synthetic biology today, and the areas of research that require better solutions to move forward. From my post as moderator of the panel, I was struck by how many attendees crowded into the session and how engaged they were.

Attendees heard from Greg, who is pushing the boundaries of DNA assembly at NEB, about the need for complex DNA in assembling genomes on the order of 100 kb. Many phage genomes can be particularly challenging, with extreme GC content, stable secondary structures, and toxic genes. Importantly, when synthesizing genomes de novo, failure of even a single genomic segment often leads to complete failure of the build, costing time, money, and progress. Jaymin noted that his microbiome editing work involves studying microbial mobile genetic elements that often contain extensive regions of homopolymers, inverted repeats, and GC extremes. Olga shared her perspective about needing complex synthetic DNA for the aging research she’s conducting that requires the creation of complex protein-coding sequences. Rapid generation of these sequences significantly accelerates the development of new therapies for age-related diseases. Tae Seok spoke at a high level about the importance of access to complex DNA for the synthetic biology field and the need to eliminate cloning bottlenecks by continuing to drive down synthesis costs while simultaneously improving capabilities and reliability.

At Ansa, one of our guiding principles is listening carefully to customer feedback and using it to guide current and future product development efforts to ensure that we are taking the most direct path to providing products and services that eliminate barriers to progress. I particularly enjoyed the panel discussion because it allowed the rest of the synthetic biology community to listen to the valuable customer feedback the Ansa team hears frequently.

If you’ve struggled to get the complex DNA you need for your research, please reach out. I’d like to hear about your prior experiences and talk about how Ansa can help.