Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis on silicon, announced that it is now shipping genes up to 3,200 base pairs (3.2 kilobase or kB) in length to Ginkgo Bioworks under their existing supply agreement.
"Twist Bioscience continues to deliver record volumes of the highest-quality DNA to advance our organism engineering efforts, meeting or exceeding our aggressive timelines," said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. "With the availability of synthetic genes up to 3.2kB from Twist, we are able to expedite the rapid prototyping of organism designs to generate cosmetics, nutritional ingredients, flavors, fragrances and other important ingredients."
In November 2015, Ginkgo and Twist Bioscience announced an agreement whereby Twist Bioscience delivered a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA to Ginkgo Bioworks over the course of 2016 — a quantity equal to approximately ten percent of the total DNA synthesis market in 2015. The agreement was expanded in June 2016 to include an additional 300 million base pairs through 2017.
"We have increased our production capacity in parallel with our ability to manufacture longer genes more affordably, and today, with unmatched scale and pricing, we are shipping industry-leading volumes of DNA to customers around the world," commented Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. "In late 2015 we expanded our manufacturing operations, and now, in addition to supporting Ginkgo's exponential growth, we are supplying DNA to accelerate research across multiple industries including pharmaceutical and biotechnology discovery, agricultural biotech and digital data storage."
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