Synthetic Genomes Are Just a Click Away

September 13, 2017

(Chemistry World) – Chemists have used one-pot click chemistry to join multiple fragments of DNA together into a functioning gene. The approach could be a more efficient and cost-effective way to synthesise genes and genomes, particularly those containing epigenetic modifications. Gene synthesis is an important tool for the life sciences and is a key part of the second generation of the Human Genome Project, HGP-write, which aims to build genomes from scratch. But synthesising long DNA sequences accurately and in reasonable yield is difficult.