13 ms·

Synthetic biology is heading for the cloud

111 points by judegomila 14y ago

jrkelly 14y ago
As a founder of one of the companies mentioned (Ginkgo BioWorks), I have to say this is actually a very nice outline of the industry. It's not clear yet if there's enough of a market for individual services to be broken out and put in the "synbio cloud". Not even clear if there is enough of a market for platforms like Ginkgo that deliver a whole organism to spec vs application-focused companies. Early days, but it's a great field for those interested in getting out of the iphone app rat-race (no offense to the author). We hire lots of programmers.
skosuri 14y ago
Are you also the PGA driving accuracy leader? http://espn.go.com/golf/statistics/_/type/type2/sort/driveAccuracyPct http://espn.go.com/golf/statistics/_/type/type2/sort/driveAc...
- jrkelly 14y ago
  Sadly no, as I'd clearly be making more money. Sri, admit that this is the best Synbio post you've seen on HN.
  - skosuri 14y ago
    Oh, Jason, not Jerry. This must be you then. http://jasonkelly.com/ http://jasonkelly.com/
mckilljoy 14y ago
I didn't realize YC was investing in bio companies now. Is that a recent development?
rflrob 14y ago
> DNA needs to be read. If you want to identify the genetic code of something you need to sequence it. This is like being able to open the source code other people's programs to see how things work, debug your experiment and is the analogue of an oscilloscope in electronics. While sequencing is incredibly useful for some applications (I spend my time working on Illumina current-generation "Next-gen" sequencing), we don't understand nearly enough about the regulation of genes for a sequencer to be analogous to an oscilloscope. It is, at best, a wiring diagram, and really much closer to a parts list. Oxford Nanopore seems really exciting, especially for field biologists, but it's at best 1 order of magnitude better (in terms of cost, speed, and sensitivity) than current technology; historical trends have seen a Moore's law-style exponential increase in capabilities, though, so Oxford Nanopore isn't really a quantum leap.
- xaa 14y ago
  For RNAseq the analogy works pretty well.
  - siganakis 14y ago
    Isn't RNASeq more like looking at really verbose log messages? Where you only sample 1% of the log messages and may be looking for an event that happens 0.01% of the time?
    - rflrob 14y ago
      The general assumption is that if you're looking for a transcript that falls below the detection threshold of RNAseq, then it's likely to be so weakly expressed as to be biologically negligible. Furthermore, with the bursty nature of gene expression, an average of 2-3 copies per cell (about my limit of detection in a reasonably sized experiment) could still have a sizable fraction of cells with none at all. That said, the downside of the Oxford Nanopore for RNA-seq is that, while you get longer reads, it's not yet really clear how many reads you get, which is at least as important for trying to find those moderate-lowly expressed genes.
caycep 14y ago
i remember ginkgo bioworks in the news, along w/ the MIT mail order biobank. Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new medicines, etc? Has any synth organisms other than what's come out of Venter's lab been created and proven viable?
- jrkelly 14y ago
  >Has any synth organisms other than what's come out of >Venter's lab been created and proven viable? You should think of the Venter work as a technical demonstration of building a very large piece of DNA (>500 kilobases, a small genome) and transplanting a whole genome into a microbe that had its original genome removed. Most of the immediate practical applications of synthetic biology don't need pieces nearly that large. If you want to add a genetic pathway to produce a chemical product, it's typically <10 additional genes that need to be added to a production microbe and that will be <50 kilobases typically. > Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new > medicines, etc? There are lots of industrial microbes out there now. For example, most Amino Acids that go into food supplements are made at massive scale - >1M tons/year by engineered microbes.
mckilljoy 14y ago
I like how this summarized the state of the industry, but I feel like "the cloud" angle was a bit forced for a lot of those companies. Most of these companies had nothing to do with the internet / cloud.
- jrkelly 14y ago
  I think by cloud he just meant "outsourced services." DNA synthesis definitely has nothing to do with the internet.
  - mckilljoy 14y ago
    Hah, I agree, but when did "cloud" become synonymous with "outsourced services"? That's kind of an abuse of the term :-)
foobar2k 14y ago
I like the comparison to the "building computers in your garage" era, this really is the start of something huge. Making a new technology space accessible to the masses is always the first step in a revolution.
GregBuchholz 14y ago
Where does an engineer/programmer start to come up to speed on synthetic biology? Are there any essential books in the field like "Learn Bio-hacking in 21 Days", "Bio-chemistry for Dummies", or "The Structure and Interpretation of DNA"? Or do those still need to be written?
- sharpshoot 14y ago
  Ron Weiss at MIT and Adam Arkin from Berkeley are working on a textbook which will ship sometime this year. But yes, there is still a first textbook still to appear for this field
  - jcarden 14y ago
    Nice! This is good to know.
- judegomila 14y ago
  "Synthetic Biology - a primer" http://www.amazon.com/Synthetic-Biology-Paul-S-Freemont/dp/1848168632 http://www.amazon.com/Synthetic-Biology-Paul-S-Freemont/dp/1...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - GregBuchholz 14y ago
    The book seems to be out-of-stock/back-ordered everywhere, but I was able to find a sample chapter, and it looks interesting: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p837/suppl_file/p837_chap01.pdf http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p837/suppl_...
  - chermanowicz 14y ago
    This is a great read. Brand new with current research.
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  Just as in programming, there are no short cuts here. http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html I too think this is something to be on the curve of. You're gonna have to at least learn the basics of [organic] chemistry, genetics, molecular genetics and cellular biology. A blackbox approach will give you a very low ceiling. Some books to start with: Genes, Proteins and Computers A Practical Introduction to the Simulation of Molecular Systems Understanding Bioinformatics
subrat_rout 14y ago
The most part of synthetic biology is a brick and mortar science which will need wet lab bench and fiddling fingers to do the development of the prototypes to test the hypothesis. So Synthetic Biology in its entirety is not going to cloud. Synthetic biology involves several steps or components such as designing a gene,synthesizing it, cloning it into appropriate vector and then expressing it. Then studying the expressed gene product in the presence of multitude of other gene products in an unknown environment poses it's unique challenges. However several components of Synthetic biology can be moved to cloud. Take an example of designing a gene of interest. It can be done taking a vast amount of data/information of several similar genes from clouds and analyzing and then optimally designing the gene of interest. The second example is testing the effect of the gene or its product in silico ( on a Lab-on-a-chip) before going to test it in real animal models thus saving costs and time. So in-silico simulated lab animal software models comprising of complex metabolic pathways can be stored in cloud for analysis from several researcher groups or any groups across world. And this is just the surface I am trying to scratch.....
- danielrhodes 14y ago
  The wetlab component of synthetic biology seems unnecessary when a lot of that work can be automated, which is where this idea of a cloud for biology has merit. Of course if you can do accurate simulations as you describe, that would be the best route.
c0nn0r 14y ago
I'm a Co-Founder of Synbiota a startup in this area. We've shipped a beta of GENtle, an open-source, web-based (HTML5) DNA editor that you can try right now at: http://synbiota.com http://synbiota.com We're also in closed beta of our integrated environment for collaboration, project management, file storage and DNA synthesis ordering etc. We have a number of iGEM teams as well as some DIYBio groups that are currently using the platform in their everyday work, which is pretty cool ;-) We've been a part of Mozilla's WebFWD accelerator since last Fall which has been a huge boost for us. Definitely check them out if you are working on a web-standards based startup! We also recently launched the S Prize - our contest to incentivize the development of open-source plug-ins for GENtle (the DNA editor) - we have a cash purse of $5k on the line for any developers who submit the most useful and delightful contributions. Check it out at: http://sprize.synbiota.com http://sprize.synbiota.com Please spread the word!
- c0nn0r 14y ago
  Ahh, forgot to mention; we've also recently partnered with Genomikon (http://genomikon.ca http://genomikon.ca) to offer biological kits (think Arduino for bio) through Synbiota (all documentation and DNA code is hosted and editable on the platform). So far we've only sent out one kit to a DIYBio group (still finalizing up production), but we hope it's the first of many.
  - GregBuchholz 14y ago
    When do you anticipate having the kit available for sale to the general public?
    - c0nn0r 14y ago
      We're shooting for September, but it will still be in limited release.
dminor14 14y ago
Seriously cool and scary technology. "many of the startups are going for "killer apps" first." he wrote this with no irony intended! I'm considering getting a degree in "bio-informatics"
mlerner 14y ago
Intern from Teselagen here. <shameless plug> We have a private Beta that you can sign up for on our website if editing your own DNA sequences is appealing to you: http://www.teselagen.com/user/registration http://www.teselagen.com/user/registration </shameless plug> It's pretty cool to see Synthetic Biology getting coverage on HN. One of the really interesting ideas that scientists are starting to grab a hold of is that of "biological parts". People have started compiling these biological circuit elements and figuring out how they work when exposed to different stimuli [1]. The ultimate aim is to standardize the usage of these parts so that you could design an organism in your browser, figure out whether it will work or not (based on a super-secret algorithm), and get the resulting functional organism shipped to your lab bench in a couple of days. As a reference, right now it can take up to 2 months to even create an initial DNA product with traditional methods. From there, it could take months to get your organism working correctly. New DNA synthesis techniques will dramatically speed up some of the initial steps (something Teselagen has done). An addition to the article I'd make is that Teselagen is actually letting people leverage new DNA synthesis techniques produced by a couple of groups (the Venter institute is one) to design better biological circuits (as in faster, better, stronger). If you are interested in reading about how scientists have begun to overcome some of the many barriers to biological circuit design, there's a good intro to advances in DNA synthesis techniques here: http://j5.jbei.org/j5manual/pages/1.html http://j5.jbei.org/j5manual/pages/1.html [1] partsregistry.org
- frisco 14y ago
  I've been waiting for an account for a couple months with you guys now... how long until you start taking more people?
  - biohacker 14y ago
    My apologies frisco. I'm co-founder at TeselaGen. We've been running like crazy, currently engaging with some of the largest biotech companies in the world. We would love to have you as a user and get your input as well. We've been holding invitations until we release our upcoming new version, later this summer. We'll be contacting you soon!
- 14y ago
jsmcgd 14y ago
Does anyone have any good ideas on how we might mitigate the negative consequences of this technology? I recently dismissed the problems of people printing firearms in a 3d printer as not really being much of a threat as currently firearms are already ubiquitous. However having a potential personal bio-weapon design lab on your desk, would seem to suggest were are entering a whole new paradigm in dangers to humanity and our biosphere. As an example and a serious question: why won't someone eventually create a virus tailor made to target their enemies? Whether that's an entire race of people, an individual or a family. The genie is definitely already out of the bottle so I guess the only solution is better defences. We're going to have to get good at identifying threats (possibly in real time) and be able to create effective solutions near instantaneously. Or isolate ourselves in self sufficient habitats as a precaution. In my mind's eye I can see Bill Joy tapping his watch and saying "Any minute now ..." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
- Cixelyn 14y ago
  The big gene synthesis companies are all a part of the international gene synthesis consortium, which has loose set of guidelines that include gene sequence screening (eg: every order is screened against a database of known pathogens, toxins, viruses, etc.). granted this is a hard problem (similar to the difficulty of fingerprinting computer viruses). So while synthesis prices are still relatively high, simple fingerprinting will probably suffice for now. There will probably be a lot of development of more advanced machine learning algorithms to detect dangerous sequences as it becomes more and more of a threat in the future.
  - jsmcgd 14y ago
    It's good to know that some thought and consideration has gone into safety. Though this does just seem like a temporary measure that will keep the white hats in check. The goals of a lot of these companies is democratization. Would you agree that all the steps of the organism creation process will (in short order) be achievable in private, for good and for ill? Personally I do think we will need some sort of active technology for protection and we shouldn't put much stock in the efficacy of legislation. We haven't been able to legislate away criminals, and we only need one criminal/virus live in the population to do an inordinate amount of damage.
tejaswiy 14y ago
I have no idea how synthetic biology works, but have a couple of questions from the applications section in the link. They talk about designing vats of bacteria that extract gold from water. If this level of customization is possible, is it also possible that you could use this to create new disease strains ? For example, can you take a Tuberculosis and engineer it to make it harder to cure? Or create entirely new diseases with elements from different infections?
- Cixelyn 14y ago
  yup that's one of the biggest fears with respect to bioterrorism. engineering bacteria to produce new strains or even deadlier toxins is well within realm of synthetic biology (although currently extremely nontrivial). Falling synthesis prices and better assembly techniques however will make the repeat-test cycle fast enough to debug and engineer such organisms.
  - mbreese 14y ago
    However, even if one could produce such an organism with diybio technology, not killing oneself in the process would still be non-trivial.
corwinbad 14y ago
Hi, this is Omri, the founder of Genome Compiler (http://genomecompiler.com http://genomecompiler.com) mentioned in the article. It's great to see many of my fellow entrepreneurs in this field shamelessly plugging away their companies :-) Anyhow, this is indeed a great field to be in and I'm happy HN is taking notice. I recommend this interview we gave for Leo Laporte (TwiT.tv) about this field: http://www.genomecompiler.com/news/2012/6/4/democratizing-creation.html http://www.genomecompiler.com/news/2012/6/4/democratizing-cr... Feel free to contact us for more information: info@genomecompiler.com
jboggan 14y ago
Transcriptic (https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs) is definitely another company to watch in that space, and they are hiring. Hopefully the legions of unemployed bioinformatics and cast-off pharmaceutical researchers will take their expertise to these new enterprises and catalyze this nascent revolution.
caycep 14y ago
Another thought is: how "wet" are a lot of the equipment being sold/marketed to "home"/"bedroom" synth biologists? IIRC from college days, there was a huge overhead in terms of, not only the apparatus (which I gather is coming down in cost), but also the chemicals in use, which require all sorts of safety regs, OSHA compliance, etc etc. How much of a barrier is this nowadays?

111 points by judegomila 14y ago

As a founder of one of the companies mentioned (Ginkgo BioWorks), I have to say this is actually a very nice outline of the industry. It's not clear yet if there's enough of a market for individual services to be broken out and put in the "synbio cloud". Not even clear if there is enough of a market for platforms like Ginkgo that deliver a whole organism to spec vs application-focused companies. Early days, but it's a great field for those interested in getting out of the iphone app rat-race (no offense to the author). We hire lots of programmers.

skosuri 14y ago

Are you also the PGA driving accuracy leader? http://espn.go.com/golf/statistics/_/type/type2/sort/driveAccuracyPct http://espn.go.com/golf/statistics/_/type/type2/sort/driveAc...

jrkelly 14y ago
Sadly no, as I'd clearly be making more money. Sri, admit that this is the best Synbio post you've seen on HN.
- skosuri 14y ago
  Oh, Jason, not Jerry. This must be you then. http://jasonkelly.com/ http://jasonkelly.com/

mckilljoy 14y ago

I didn't realize YC was investing in bio companies now. Is that a recent development?

rflrob 14y ago

> DNA needs to be read. If you want to identify the genetic code of something you need to sequence it. This is like being able to open the source code other people's programs to see how things work, debug your experiment and is the analogue of an oscilloscope in electronics. While sequencing is incredibly useful for some applications (I spend my time working on Illumina current-generation "Next-gen" sequencing), we don't understand nearly enough about the regulation of genes for a sequencer to be analogous to an oscilloscope. It is, at best, a wiring diagram, and really much closer to a parts list. Oxford Nanopore seems really exciting, especially for field biologists, but it's at best 1 order of magnitude better (in terms of cost, speed, and sensitivity) than current technology; historical trends have seen a Moore's law-style exponential increase in capabilities, though, so Oxford Nanopore isn't really a quantum leap.

xaa 14y ago
For RNAseq the analogy works pretty well.
- siganakis 14y ago
  Isn't RNASeq more like looking at really verbose log messages? Where you only sample 1% of the log messages and may be looking for an event that happens 0.01% of the time?
  - rflrob 14y ago
    The general assumption is that if you're looking for a transcript that falls below the detection threshold of RNAseq, then it's likely to be so weakly expressed as to be biologically negligible. Furthermore, with the bursty nature of gene expression, an average of 2-3 copies per cell (about my limit of detection in a reasonably sized experiment) could still have a sizable fraction of cells with none at all. That said, the downside of the Oxford Nanopore for RNA-seq is that, while you get longer reads, it's not yet really clear how many reads you get, which is at least as important for trying to find those moderate-lowly expressed genes.

caycep 14y ago

i remember ginkgo bioworks in the news, along w/ the MIT mail order biobank. Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new medicines, etc? Has any synth organisms other than what's come out of Venter's lab been created and proven viable?

jrkelly 14y ago
>Has any synth organisms other than what's come out of >Venter's lab been created and proven viable? You should think of the Venter work as a technical demonstration of building a very large piece of DNA (>500 kilobases, a small genome) and transplanting a whole genome into a microbe that had its original genome removed. Most of the immediate practical applications of synthetic biology don't need pieces nearly that large. If you want to add a genetic pathway to produce a chemical product, it's typically <10 additional genes that need to be added to a production microbe and that will be <50 kilobases typically. > Any pointers onto papers that have come out of this or new > medicines, etc? There are lots of industrial microbes out there now. For example, most Amino Acids that go into food supplements are made at massive scale - >1M tons/year by engineered microbes.

mckilljoy 14y ago

I like how this summarized the state of the industry, but I feel like "the cloud" angle was a bit forced for a lot of those companies. Most of these companies had nothing to do with the internet / cloud.

jrkelly 14y ago
I think by cloud he just meant "outsourced services." DNA synthesis definitely has nothing to do with the internet.
- mckilljoy 14y ago
  Hah, I agree, but when did "cloud" become synonymous with "outsourced services"? That's kind of an abuse of the term :-)

foobar2k 14y ago

I like the comparison to the "building computers in your garage" era, this really is the start of something huge. Making a new technology space accessible to the masses is always the first step in a revolution.

GregBuchholz 14y ago

Where does an engineer/programmer start to come up to speed on synthetic biology? Are there any essential books in the field like "Learn Bio-hacking in 21 Days", "Bio-chemistry for Dummies", or "The Structure and Interpretation of DNA"? Or do those still need to be written?

sharpshoot 14y ago
Ron Weiss at MIT and Adam Arkin from Berkeley are working on a textbook which will ship sometime this year. But yes, there is still a first textbook still to appear for this field
- jcarden 14y ago
  Nice! This is good to know.
judegomila 14y ago
"Synthetic Biology - a primer" http://www.amazon.com/Synthetic-Biology-Paul-S-Freemont/dp/1848168632 http://www.amazon.com/Synthetic-Biology-Paul-S-Freemont/dp/1...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- GregBuchholz 14y ago
  The book seems to be out-of-stock/back-ordered everywhere, but I was able to find a sample chapter, and it looks interesting: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p837/suppl_file/p837_chap01.pdf http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p837/suppl_...
- chermanowicz 14y ago
  This is a great read. Brand new with current research.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
Just as in programming, there are no short cuts here. http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html I too think this is something to be on the curve of. You're gonna have to at least learn the basics of [organic] chemistry, genetics, molecular genetics and cellular biology. A blackbox approach will give you a very low ceiling. Some books to start with: Genes, Proteins and Computers A Practical Introduction to the Simulation of Molecular Systems Understanding Bioinformatics

subrat_rout 14y ago

The most part of synthetic biology is a brick and mortar science which will need wet lab bench and fiddling fingers to do the development of the prototypes to test the hypothesis. So Synthetic Biology in its entirety is not going to cloud. Synthetic biology involves several steps or components such as designing a gene,synthesizing it, cloning it into appropriate vector and then expressing it. Then studying the expressed gene product in the presence of multitude of other gene products in an unknown environment poses it's unique challenges. However several components of Synthetic biology can be moved to cloud. Take an example of designing a gene of interest. It can be done taking a vast amount of data/information of several similar genes from clouds and analyzing and then optimally designing the gene of interest. The second example is testing the effect of the gene or its product in silico ( on a Lab-on-a-chip) before going to test it in real animal models thus saving costs and time. So in-silico simulated lab animal software models comprising of complex metabolic pathways can be stored in cloud for analysis from several researcher groups or any groups across world. And this is just the surface I am trying to scratch.....

danielrhodes 14y ago
The wetlab component of synthetic biology seems unnecessary when a lot of that work can be automated, which is where this idea of a cloud for biology has merit. Of course if you can do accurate simulations as you describe, that would be the best route.

c0nn0r 14y ago

I'm a Co-Founder of Synbiota a startup in this area. We've shipped a beta of GENtle, an open-source, web-based (HTML5) DNA editor that you can try right now at: http://synbiota.com http://synbiota.com We're also in closed beta of our integrated environment for collaboration, project management, file storage and DNA synthesis ordering etc. We have a number of iGEM teams as well as some DIYBio groups that are currently using the platform in their everyday work, which is pretty cool ;-) We've been a part of Mozilla's WebFWD accelerator since last Fall which has been a huge boost for us. Definitely check them out if you are working on a web-standards based startup! We also recently launched the S Prize - our contest to incentivize the development of open-source plug-ins for GENtle (the DNA editor) - we have a cash purse of $5k on the line for any developers who submit the most useful and delightful contributions. Check it out at: http://sprize.synbiota.com http://sprize.synbiota.com Please spread the word!

c0nn0r 14y ago
Ahh, forgot to mention; we've also recently partnered with Genomikon (http://genomikon.ca http://genomikon.ca) to offer biological kits (think Arduino for bio) through Synbiota (all documentation and DNA code is hosted and editable on the platform). So far we've only sent out one kit to a DIYBio group (still finalizing up production), but we hope it's the first of many.
- GregBuchholz 14y ago
  When do you anticipate having the kit available for sale to the general public?
  - c0nn0r 14y ago
    We're shooting for September, but it will still be in limited release.

dminor14 14y ago

Seriously cool and scary technology. "many of the startups are going for "killer apps" first." he wrote this with no irony intended! I'm considering getting a degree in "bio-informatics"

mlerner 14y ago

Intern from Teselagen here. <shameless plug> We have a private Beta that you can sign up for on our website if editing your own DNA sequences is appealing to you: http://www.teselagen.com/user/registration http://www.teselagen.com/user/registration </shameless plug> It's pretty cool to see Synthetic Biology getting coverage on HN. One of the really interesting ideas that scientists are starting to grab a hold of is that of "biological parts". People have started compiling these biological circuit elements and figuring out how they work when exposed to different stimuli [1]. The ultimate aim is to standardize the usage of these parts so that you could design an organism in your browser, figure out whether it will work or not (based on a super-secret algorithm), and get the resulting functional organism shipped to your lab bench in a couple of days. As a reference, right now it can take up to 2 months to even create an initial DNA product with traditional methods. From there, it could take months to get your organism working correctly. New DNA synthesis techniques will dramatically speed up some of the initial steps (something Teselagen has done). An addition to the article I'd make is that Teselagen is actually letting people leverage new DNA synthesis techniques produced by a couple of groups (the Venter institute is one) to design better biological circuits (as in faster, better, stronger). If you are interested in reading about how scientists have begun to overcome some of the many barriers to biological circuit design, there's a good intro to advances in DNA synthesis techniques here: http://j5.jbei.org/j5manual/pages/1.html http://j5.jbei.org/j5manual/pages/1.html [1] partsregistry.org

frisco 14y ago
I've been waiting for an account for a couple months with you guys now... how long until you start taking more people?
- biohacker 14y ago
  My apologies frisco. I'm co-founder at TeselaGen. We've been running like crazy, currently engaging with some of the largest biotech companies in the world. We would love to have you as a user and get your input as well. We've been holding invitations until we release our upcoming new version, later this summer. We'll be contacting you soon!
14y ago

jsmcgd 14y ago

Does anyone have any good ideas on how we might mitigate the negative consequences of this technology? I recently dismissed the problems of people printing firearms in a 3d printer as not really being much of a threat as currently firearms are already ubiquitous. However having a potential personal bio-weapon design lab on your desk, would seem to suggest were are entering a whole new paradigm in dangers to humanity and our biosphere. As an example and a serious question: why won't someone eventually create a virus tailor made to target their enemies? Whether that's an entire race of people, an individual or a family. The genie is definitely already out of the bottle so I guess the only solution is better defences. We're going to have to get good at identifying threats (possibly in real time) and be able to create effective solutions near instantaneously. Or isolate ourselves in self sufficient habitats as a precaution. In my mind's eye I can see Bill Joy tapping his watch and saying "Any minute now ..." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Cixelyn 14y ago
The big gene synthesis companies are all a part of the international gene synthesis consortium, which has loose set of guidelines that include gene sequence screening (eg: every order is screened against a database of known pathogens, toxins, viruses, etc.). granted this is a hard problem (similar to the difficulty of fingerprinting computer viruses). So while synthesis prices are still relatively high, simple fingerprinting will probably suffice for now. There will probably be a lot of development of more advanced machine learning algorithms to detect dangerous sequences as it becomes more and more of a threat in the future.
- jsmcgd 14y ago
  It's good to know that some thought and consideration has gone into safety. Though this does just seem like a temporary measure that will keep the white hats in check. The goals of a lot of these companies is democratization. Would you agree that all the steps of the organism creation process will (in short order) be achievable in private, for good and for ill? Personally I do think we will need some sort of active technology for protection and we shouldn't put much stock in the efficacy of legislation. We haven't been able to legislate away criminals, and we only need one criminal/virus live in the population to do an inordinate amount of damage.

tejaswiy 14y ago

I have no idea how synthetic biology works, but have a couple of questions from the applications section in the link. They talk about designing vats of bacteria that extract gold from water. If this level of customization is possible, is it also possible that you could use this to create new disease strains ? For example, can you take a Tuberculosis and engineer it to make it harder to cure? Or create entirely new diseases with elements from different infections?

Cixelyn 14y ago
yup that's one of the biggest fears with respect to bioterrorism. engineering bacteria to produce new strains or even deadlier toxins is well within realm of synthetic biology (although currently extremely nontrivial). Falling synthesis prices and better assembly techniques however will make the repeat-test cycle fast enough to debug and engineer such organisms.
- mbreese 14y ago
  However, even if one could produce such an organism with diybio technology, not killing oneself in the process would still be non-trivial.

corwinbad 14y ago

Hi, this is Omri, the founder of Genome Compiler (http://genomecompiler.com http://genomecompiler.com) mentioned in the article. It's great to see many of my fellow entrepreneurs in this field shamelessly plugging away their companies :-) Anyhow, this is indeed a great field to be in and I'm happy HN is taking notice. I recommend this interview we gave for Leo Laporte (TwiT.tv) about this field: http://www.genomecompiler.com/news/2012/6/4/democratizing-creation.html http://www.genomecompiler.com/news/2012/6/4/democratizing-cr... Feel free to contact us for more information: info@genomecompiler.com

jboggan 14y ago

Transcriptic (https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs https://www.transcriptic.com/about/jobs) is definitely another company to watch in that space, and they are hiring. Hopefully the legions of unemployed bioinformatics and cast-off pharmaceutical researchers will take their expertise to these new enterprises and catalyze this nascent revolution.

caycep 14y ago

Another thought is: how "wet" are a lot of the equipment being sold/marketed to "home"/"bedroom" synth biologists? IIRC from college days, there was a huge overhead in terms of, not only the apparatus (which I gather is coming down in cost), but also the chemicals in use, which require all sorts of safety regs, OSHA compliance, etc etc. How much of a barrier is this nowadays?