custom gene synthesis - (May/25/2004 )

Custom gene synthesis is very useful for low-copy, CG-rich and hard-to-clone genes. However, it also very costy.

Anybody know which vendor is cheaper/reliable? So far the cheapest and reliable source we found is from Epoch Biolabs. Their charge is US$1.50 per base-pair without any extra hidden fee (flat charge with any size, any sequence). Also, they got very strong customer recommendation.

You mean the whole lengh of a gene can be synthesized? Then what's the lengh limit?

The sky's the limit, and your budget, of course!

I know a company in europe that does synthetic genes, since some of our postdocs ended up working for them.

It's called "geneart"

http://www.geneart.com/

I don't know the charges per basepair or what customer recommendation they have, but, as i said, I know some of the guys that work there personally, so I would think they are doing a good job!

They also do optimisation of GC content for expression or or adaption of eukaryotic genes to prokaryotic expression systems and so on....

Maybe worth a look!

Mike

Actually, Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, has set up a new organization, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA) to synthysize a minimal genome containing about 300-400 genes and insert the genome into a cell. He hopes to use it as a foundation for building a much larger genome, endowed with new genes that would enable it to produce hydrogen fuel on an industrial scale or efficiently suck in the carbon dioxide released by a power plant.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=12586921