I'm trying to learn about what the state of technology is at presently. It seems like we clearly can go from nucleotide to digitally stored sequence, but can we transcribe something from the digital sequence?
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$\begingroup$ Are you asking about synthetic biology? Can you give a bit more context? The answer is it depends, e.g. one can trivially synthesise short primers but not a whole human genome $\endgroup$– Chris_RandsApr 26, 2020 at 17:04
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$\begingroup$ @Chris_Rands, you mean an amount of material required for an insertion is doable, but you can't synthesize a complete gene? I'm trying to understand the technological state of bio-engineering, and trying to understand the workflow. $\endgroup$– J. M. BeckerApr 27, 2020 at 21:04
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2 Answers
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Oligonucleotide synthesis is a service offered by many providers such as IDT.
answered Apr 24, 2020 at 22:52
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$\begingroup$ What is interesting is how phosphoramidite synthesis differs from how polymerases do it. It is a solid state synthesis approach that expands from the 3' to the 5' in cycles of reaction and 2'-deprotection to allow a single nucleotide to be added at a time. $\endgroup$ Apr 26, 2020 at 13:13
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To add to @Maximilian Press' answer.
There is quite a lot of research on how to store arbitrary digital data in DNA. Nick Goldman describes his research on the topic in his TEDx talk. The last progress in the field I have noticed was DNA fountain, a tranformation of bites in DNA with maximal efficiency of data storage in DNA (information / nt) and reliable recovery when sequenced afterwards.
answered Apr 28, 2020 at 12:47