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Editor’s Choice: Cheap DNA Sequencing Is Here. Writing DNA Is Next

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Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

At Twist Biosciences’ office in San Francisco, CEO Emily Leproust pulled out of her tote bag two things she carries around everywhere: a standard 96-well plastic plate ubiquitous in biology labs and her company’s invention, a silicon wafer studded with a similar number of nanowells.

Leproust, Peck, and a third cofounder, Bill Banyai, realized DNA synthesis needed a middle ground between the classic method and microarrays. Thus, the holes inside the nanowells of Twist’s wafer are essentially thousands of reasonably-sized test tubes. You end up with the right amount of oligos, neither too much or too little. For the full article in WIRED see: Cheap DNA Sequencing Is Here. Writing DNA Is Next

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