Synthetic gene cost slashed to $2

Biotechnologists have been frustrated by the cost of making large pools of genes – but now US researchers can cheaply make collections of thousands of different DNA strands. Sriram Kosuri’s team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), calls its approach DropSynth, and say it produces each gene for less than $2 (£1.48). ‘An individual in a lab can make 10,000 genes,’ Kosuri tells Chemistry World. ‘Before this paper was published that would have taken $1 million and a consortium to build.’