The Biggest DNA Ever Made

Again I stress that this is old news...but here's the thing.. I was looking around the other day for the longest DNA ever made (synthetic ofcourse) and look what i found on forbes.com

there are some links here which will take u to forbes.com
We've already mentioned about Codon Devices earlier..click here to read it..

Matthew Herper, 07.13.06, 6:00 AM ET

A tiny startup says it has created a stretch of DNA more than 35,000 letters long.

The company, Codon Devices of Cambridge, Mass., believes it is the longest piece of DNA ever ever commercially shipped--but that's only the latest step in a race to create bigger and bigger pieces of genetic material.

Codon is aiming to become the leading player in a new field called "synthetic biology," creating tools by which cells and their genetic material can be more precisely engineered in order to create new medicines and industry. In this case, the DNA was constructed for Microbia, another Cambridge biotech that is developing drugs and creating microbes that can be used in manufacturing chemicals.

The creation of ever-longer stretches of man-made DNA is allowing researchers to make new strides in understanding how multiple genes work together.

"This is basically the next step in synthetic biology," says Brian Baynes, Codon's chief scientific officer. "People have been doing a lot of work with synthetic genes for a number of years, but they've been stuck with one gene."

On a piece of DNA as long as the one made for Microbia, ten or more genes may be present. By studying more than one gene at once, researchers hope to get a better picture of how they work in concert to produce an organism. Another advantage: These stretches can also be made to contain all the DNA letters that occur between genes. Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk, but many now believe it may regulate how the genes work or provide some other function.

Scientists playing in the synthetic-biology toolbox have also managed to make living cells do things nature never designed. One setup created blinking lights; another made photographic film composed of living bacteria in a Petri dish.

Codon was founded a year ago on the idea that scientists would need a company that could sell tools used in creating such custom-designed biological systems (see: " Photoshop For DNA").

Other companies are also in the business of making DNA for drug companies and other research organizations, which save time by using newer DNA synthesis methods instead of laboriously copying cells and inserting or deleting bits of genetic material.

Blue Heron Biotechnology, a company that is in the sole business of synthesizing DNA, says it made a piece of DNA that was 27,000 letters long while working with academic researchers. But the company says it sees itself as more of a supplier to synthetic biologists than as a player in the field. "I am optimistic that in a few years things like synthetic biology will be half or more of our market," says Chief Executive John Mulligan. "We're a pure DNA foundry."

Codon says that within a year or two it hopes to create DNA fragments that are as much as 100,000 letters long, and that eventually they might make 1-million-letter fragments.

"Codon's charge from the beginning has been to industrialize this space and create something well beyond synthetic biology that we call constructive biology," says Chief Executive John Danner. He says that by December of this year he hopes to have more DNA production capacity than all his competitors currently have combined.

Awesome stuff considering its just a start up...while we look out even more, stay tuned because, this blog is soon gonna be the definative Gene Synthesis Blog