The Ansa team was thrilled to participate in this year’s Global Synthetic Biology conference, better known to the community as SynBioBeta. It’s the leading annual event for the synthetic biology field, but for us, it has a more personal connection — SynBioBeta is where we began telling the story of our technology a few years ago, and last year it’s where we had our official corporate launch with our first commercial synthetic DNA products. You can bet we had big plans this year too!
SynBioBeta is where the synthetic biology community comes together to share inspiration, technology updates, and scientific advances. It’s a forum to celebrate everything that’s going right, and to have candid and productive discussions about anything that isn’t working so well just yet. We love the broad appeal this meeting holds for everyone who’s passionate about the potential for synthetic biology. Where else could you find speakers as varied as a Microsoft CTO, a NASA astronaut, and the head of a biologics AI platform from a major pharmaceutical company? Attendees come from academia, pharma, government and funding agencies, synbio startups, and more. The conference is also an international draw, with attendees coming from more than 50 countries. This year the meeting even had international pavilions for Japan and the UK. It’s truly awe-inspiring to see the traction this field has gained around the world, with so much opportunity to address many of the most pressing challenges facing us and our planet.
There were several key themes at this year’s SynBioBeta. Some are mainstays at the conference, such as sustainability in manufacturing and other ways to address climate change, as well as synthetic biology for food products. The bioeconomy and biosecurity, as always, got a lot of well-deserved attention. This year, there was also a big emphasis on longevity and aging, biocomputing, and neuro tech. Of course, AI was everywhere, from protein engineering to therapeutics and more.
For us, we were excited to go back this year and update the meeting’s 2,000-plus attendees on our latest progress: a new early access program for our 50 Kb synthetic DNA. (Given that we launched with 600 base pair products a year before, it’s quite the leap forward.)
Our CEO Jason Gammack took to the stage a couple of times. In a panel discussion with other industry leaders, he spoke about the need to improve the speed, quality, and accessibility of high-quality synthetic DNA. And in a plenary talk, he told attendees about the transformative Ansa On-Time Guarantee, our commitment that customers will get their complete orders on time or we’ll send the DNA at no charge. The guarantee program is based on our strong belief that science will be more innovative and efficient when researchers know they can count on getting all of the DNA they need when they need it.
Back at our booth, visitors had a chance to review two posters developed by Ansa customers:
A poster from Greg Lohman of New England Biolabs reported success with phage engineering using synthetic mycobacteriophages created with Ansa’s help. With a high GC content (60%-70%) and large size (50 kb+), the mycobacteriaphage genomes made PCR amplification and DNA synthesis difficult, and the in silico designed parts were considered too complex for phosphoramidite synthesis by multiple vendors. Ansa was able to synthesize all fragments. The cloned and sequence-verified parts permitted easy generation of high-quality DNA for Golden Gate assembly and the insertion of anti-defense genes, laying the groundwork for therapeutics against hospital-acquired mycobacterial infections.
A poster from the Gao Lab at Stanford University showed how that team expanded the capabilities of traditional gene circuits into secretion protein circuits. They developed a suite of protein engineering approaches to enable this level of programmability completely at the protein level, with potential uses in AAV vectors and mRNA for use in transient therapeutics. The authors reported that Ansa’s DNA synthesis service helped them produce cleavage-optimizing constructs with variable processing domains.
And of course, it wouldn’t have been SynBioBeta without the celebrations. We had the privilege of hosting a rooftop cocktail party where attendees could relax and have some fun after a long day of drinking from the synbio firehose.
The entire Ansa team would like to thank the attendees who took time out of their very busy schedules to join our talks, visit our booth, or come to our party. Thanks too to our customers for creating posters and presentations so they could tell the community about their experience working with Ansa. And we’re also grateful to the conference organizers for producing a terrific event. We’re already looking forward to next year’s meeting!