In our August 2024 webinar, we were joined by Jaymin Patel, PhD, an early access customer of Ansa’s gene fragments & clonal products, who works in the Cress and Doudna Labs at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley. He is part of the Berkeley Initiative for Optimized Microbiome Editing (BIOME), an interdisciplinary group of scientists that edit microbiomes for applications in inflammatory diseases, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from food production, and improving nitrogen cycling and soil health. Jaymin identifies and engineers novel gene editing technologies found in nature to enable editing microbiomes with precision. DNA synthesis has been a key bottleneck for him, but also an enabling force.
By delivering multiplexed (and thus highly repetitive sequences) CRISPR arrays and the newly characterized IS110 systems, Ansa has enabled him to edit multiple loci in genomes at once. This can dramatically increase the rate of learning how multiple edits in a single gene or multiple different genes interact with one another. Given the constraints of legacy DNA synthesis providers, he would have been met with delays, rejections, resulting in building these constructs in-house using complex, time-consuming molecular biology. “It’s a remarkable level of structural complexity and sequence complexity and repetitiveness that was no problem for Ansa to synthesize,” said Patel.
Delivering gene editing tools to the diverse organisms of the microbiome is a major challenge in genome editing that BIOME is addressing. They are exploring alternative plasmid backbones and bacteriophages that enable editing organisms, such as archaebacteria, that are often intractable for gene editing. Ansa’s ability to synthesize a huge diversity of repetitive DNA elements found in plasmid systems, whose repetition is essential for their function, is an asset for their work.
Patel remarked, “As we develop new genome editing technologies and delivery tools to achieve precise microbiome editing, the speed and rate with which we can do this work depends on the speed and rate at which we can synthesize DNA. It’s been great working with Ansa to have access to these new mechanisms of DNA synthesis that allow us to break some of the bottlenecks we were facing previously.”
Customers ordering genes have come to expect rejections and delays from legacy DNA synthesis providers. This causes inefficiencies and delays in the development of next generation therapeutics (eg cell & gene therapies), agricultural products, and more. Ansa Biotechnologies has developed a novel enzymatic DNA synthesis approach, utilizing polymerase-nucleotide conjugates, that generates ultra-long oligos, sidestepping the failure-prone process of oligo assembly to create genes and gene fragments. With the recent launch of 600 base clonal and fragment products, Ansa reliably synthesizes among the most complex, repetitive DNA sequences that other vendors reject.