Spatially Selective Electrochemical Cleavage of a Polymerase-Nucleotide Conjugate.

Novel enzymatic methods are poised to become the dominant processes for de novo synthesis of DNA, promising functional, economic, and environmental advantages over the longstanding approach of phosphoramidite synthesis. Before this can occur, however, enzymatic synthesis methods must be parallelized to enable production of multiple DNA sequences simultaneously. As a means to this parallelization, we report a polymerase-nucleotide conjugate that is cleaved using electrochemical oxidation on a microelectrode array.

Scaling DNA data storage with nanoscale electrode wells.

Synthetic DNA is an attractive medium for long-term data storage because of its density, ease of copying, sustainability, and longevity. Recent advances have focused on the development of new encoding algorithms, automation, preservation, and sequencing technologies. Despite progress in these areas, the most challenging hurdle in deployment of DNA data storage remains the write throughput, which limits data storage capacity.

A transatlantic perspective on 20 emerging issues in biological engineering.

Advances in biological engineering are likely to have substantial impacts on global society. To explore these potential impacts we ran a horizon scanning exercise to capture a range of perspectives on the opportunities and risks presented by biological engineering. We first identified 70 potential issues, and then used an iterative process to prioritise 20 issues that we considered to be emerging, to have potential global impact, and to be relatively unknown outside the field of biological engineering.