Spatially Selective Electrochemical Cleavage of a Polymerase-Nucleotide Conjugate.

Novel enzymatic methods are poised to become the dominant processes for de novo synthesis of DNA, promising functional, economic, and environmental advantages over the longstanding approach of phosphoramidite synthesis. Before this can occur, however, enzymatic synthesis methods must be parallelized to enable production of multiple DNA sequences simultaneously. As a means to this parallelization, we report a polymerase-nucleotide conjugate that is cleaved using electrochemical oxidation on a microelectrode array. The developed conjugate maintains polymerase activity toward surface-bound substrates with single-base control and detaches from the surface at mild oxidative voltages, leaving an extendable oligonucleotide behind. Our approach readies the way for enzymatic DNA synthesis on the scale necessary for DNA-intensive applications such as DNA data storage or gene synthesis.

Scaling DNA data storage with nanoscale electrode wells.

Synthetic DNA is an attractive medium for long-term data storage because of its density, ease of copying, sustainability, and longevity. Recent advances have focused on the development of new encoding algorithms, automation, preservation, and sequencing technologies. Despite progress in these areas, the most challenging hurdle in deployment of DNA data storage remains the write throughput, which limits data storage capacity. We have developed the first nanoscale DNA storage writer, which we expect to scale DNA write density to 25 × 106 sequences per square centimeter, three orders of magnitude improvement over existing DNA synthesis arrays. We show confinement of DNA synthesis to an area under 1 square micrometer, parallelized over millions of nanoelectrode wells and then successfully write and decode a message in DNA. DNA synthesis on this scale will enable write throughputs to reach megabytes per second and is a key enabler to a practical DNA data storage system.

A transatlantic perspective on 20 emerging issues in biological engineering.

Advances in biological engineering are likely to have substantial impacts on global society. To explore these potential impacts we ran a horizon scanning exercise to capture a range of perspectives on the opportunities and risks presented by biological engineering. We first identified 70 potential issues, and then used an iterative process to prioritise 20 issues that we considered to be emerging, to have potential global impact, and to be relatively unknown outside the field of biological engineering. The issues identified may be of interest to researchers, businesses and policy makers in sectors such as health, energy, agriculture and the environment.