Gen9’s Elizabeth Nickerson launched their latest product offering in London: an online design and ordering platform for custom synthetic genes. Powered by Benchling, a developer of cloud-based solutions for life scientists, which recently raised $5M in private financing, the new portal streamlines the design and ordering of DNA constructs.The platform offers optimization tools that process multiple sequences at once and speeds up the sequence analysis. It also features a drag-and-drop sequence upload, cloud data storage, shipment tracking and history. “Gen9 has already changed the game in gene synthesis with our high-throughput BioFab platform. With the launch of this portal, we’re reinventing the design and ordering process for DNA,” said Kevin Munnelly, President and Chief Executive Officer of Gen9, Inc.Founded in 2009 by Joseph Jacobson, George Church and Drew Endy, the company has raised over $50 million to date to commercialize its service. In the traditional gene synthesis approach, oligos are stitched together, inserted into bacteria which multiply the quantity of DNA, then it is extracted from multiple colonies and sequenced to verify if the synthetic gene was successfully produced. But Gen9 avoids the costly sequencing step through the use of an enzyme that repairs the mismatches by identifying bases that differ from the population’s consensus.The company synthesizes genes ranging from 500bp to 10kbp and it runs an annual G-Prize contest to award scientists and pre-commercial startups with a total of 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA. The contest was created to stimulate innovative uses for synthetic genes and the synthetic biology field in general.

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