Gen9 was acquired by Ginko Bioworks in January 2017. The firm had been building on advances in synthetic biology to power a scalable fabrication capability designed significantly to increase the capacity to produce DNA content. The privately held companys next-generation gene synthesis technology allows for the high-throughput, automated production of DNA constructs at lower cost and higher accuracy than previous methods on the market. This enables the constructive application of synthetic biology in industries ranging from enzyme and chemical production to pharmaceuticals and biofuels. As an active member of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium (IGSC), Gen9 screens all submitted sequences against databases of known pathogens and toxins from the United States, European Union and Australia. Gen9 has developed BioFab, a new system that can quickly and cheaply produce tens of thousands of double-stranded DNA fragments of between 500 and 1,000 base pairs in length. This will immensely benefit pharmaceutical, chemical, and fuel companies, who increasingly depend on synthetic biology to produce DNA tailor-made to suit their production needs. The companys system for biological fabrication couples inexpensively made small DNA fragments with patented or patent-pending chemical processes that accurately assemble them into larger DNA strands, which the platform can do in bulk.
