PathFinder DNA Assembly™
Building genes from the bottom up using Molecular Programming.
The cost of synthesizing mixtures of short (<300 bases) DNA strands is already close to zero. However, their assembly into longer (1 to 5 kilobases), functional DNA molecules, with high fidelity, is prohibitively expensive at large scale. Conventional approaches rely on a top-down process to manipulate only a handful of DNA strands at a time. Instead, we molecularly program the assembly protocol into the sequences of the DNA strands so that tens of thousands of short DNA strands can self-assemble into thousands of long genes simultaneously, with pinpoint accuracy. This bottom-up process is what we call PathFinder DNA Assembly™. We have reported its first application in TCR gene synthesis on Nature Biotechnology.
Molecular Toothpick™
Screening millions of virtual colonies enables error-free gene synthesis.
Short synthetic DNA strands often contain errors on the scale of 1 in 100 bases and the genes assembled from these fragments inherit these errors. To combat this, we developed a complementary technology called Molecular Toothpick™. This technology examines every base pair of the synthetic gene product and selectively recovers the error-free molecules. Most importantly, this is done without the extensive infrastructure needed for conventional bacterial colony screening, further unlocking our synthesis capacity.