Comment by toufka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toufka | Hacker News Reader

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From a biology perspective, the value in DNA synthesis has plateaus. (I’m curious about analogies to other commodities?)

If you can build small runs (<50base pairs) you can make small mutations to dna, or read particular sections of dna. If you can make dna larger than the average protein (~2000bp) you can invent new proteins from scratch rather than modify existing protein sequences. If you can make dna longer than a plasmid (~10,000bp) you can creatively invent a minimal viable replicable and deliverable unit (a plasmid (bacterial virus)). If you can do millions if base pairs you get to chromosomes and can invent Eucaryotic-transmissable storage.

But until you leap those plateaus, you can likely saturate the intervening market. So even if there’s massive pent up theoretical demand for the wholesale invention of genes, there’s no way to really demonstrate it in the current market.

This inability to estimate demand may make it a tricky spot to invest in.

The issue is also we don't know what to write. I'm being a bit extreme here, but not being able to do rational design limits things to mostly 1) build a lot of variants, using some educated guessing, 2) test those variants, 3) plug those results into some model and predict what to build next.

So the value of each individual variant is relatively low, since you don't know if it will work or not. Plus a lot of other investments have to be made into the toolchain (developing assays for the thing you actually care about is not easy).

In your plateaus, the possibility space explodes with each step function. We are already at the first rung of the ladder of building many 50bp variants. Generally, you'd probably want to be able to conduct an experimental cycle with 1000s of variants. At the upper end, you'd want to pay $5000-10000 for each cycle. There is demand for making protein-length sequences, but the prices the market is willing to pay is probably closer to $10/gene (fully customizable 2kbp) rather than the current price.

Another thing is that not all sequences are created equally. Some sequences will just not synthesize well (maybe there's secondary structure), so to limit costs one ought to limit the number of retries per sequence.

Can the replication process that occurs when a cell divides be used for data copying? It seems like this, if doable, would be a huge boon for DNA storage.

It’s already used: look up Polymerase chain reaction.

Copying isn’t as interesting as de novo synthesis, being able to specify an arbitrary sequence and have it synthesized.

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