Design/Test/Build

[Manuel Montori]

hey guys – curious to get your more experienced takes on a question I was discussing with some friends. 

what are the biggest time blocks in the synthetic bio design/test/build cycle, and how fast can you make the cycle? 

Say for example you're designing e. coli to express GFP. my understanding is a typical process is you'd design a plasmid and order it on a website like addgene, which takes 1-2 months? then you'd introduce it to the organism and see how well it works, and repeat if you need to make tweaks. is that broadly right, and is there a way to speed this up significantly?

[Michael Crone]

Addgene is only there to order plasmids previous designed and published by others.

You would order an original plasmid from GeneArt (Thermofisher) or Twist Biosciences. It usually takes around 2 weeks, but depends on the complexity of what you design. If you need to make tweaks it really depends on what changes you make. If you're smart with the cloning strategy you can test multiple designs every week (this would include cloning new plasmids, making plasmid preps of them and sequencing and then testing the construct in your organism). So the length of the DBTL cycle can be decreased to around a week, perhaps shorter with fast growing organisms like V natriegens.