Sudarshan Pinglay: 'Our vision is to have complementary technologies that address the shortcomings of current systems for manufacturing DNA.'
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is awarding BBI researchers $1.5 million over two years to identify cost-effective and scalable ways to “democratize” access to synthetic DNA, therefore enabling scientists to overcome current limitations in protein design and other biotech applications.
“Our vision is to have complementary technologies that address the shortcomings of current systems for manufacturing DNA,” said Sudarshan Pinglay, Ph.D., a BBI faculty member with the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the joint endeavor among BBI, the UW, CZI, and the Allen Institute. “We cannot get enough synthetic DNA to do the things we want to do. This CZI grant is pivotal toward accomplishing our goal over the next couple of years to solve DNA synthesis problems. Protein design is the best example of where this is a major bottleneck.”
There is no cost-effective, fast, scalable, accurate, and flexible source of synthetic DNA beyond a few 100 base pairs, according to Pinglay. This imposes an artificial constraint on burgeoning technologies, such as de novo protein design, limiting the scale of the new proteins that can be designed and tested in the lab.
Pinglay and his co-grantees – BBI’s Sanjay Srivatsan, Ph.D., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and Calin Plesa, Ph.D., of the University of Oregon – plan to advance three complementary methods to increase the scale of synthetic DNA production. They hope to integrate improvements from all three efforts into one method by the end of the grant period.
“My colleagues and I are hopeful our work will enable not just us – but researchers everywhere – in a few years to readily obtain synthetic DNA,” Pinglay said.
