Next generation DNA engineering
Two accomplished genomics scientists, Dr. Sasha Levy and Professor Gavin Sherlock, and Dave Craford, an experienced life sciences CEO, co-founded BacStitch DNA, Inc to develop and commercialize a transformative platform technology that enables highly efficient DNA engineering and will advance the development of Synthetic Biology solutions to problems in medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture.
Current workflows that engineer DNA that codes for multiple genes and pathways are complex, difficult to automate, and expensive. BacStitch DNA, Inc will replace these with simple, easy-to-automate, cost-effective workflows where bacteria, instead of people, do most of the work.
The technology involves programming bacteria to stitch "bac-stitch" and move DNA. In addition to efficiently assembling long DNA constructs (currently have feasibility data for >25kb), the platform can manipulate complex DNA with high GC content and repeats. It can also introduce directed variation in multiple user-definable regions within the constructs, and the component parts of the constructs can easily be rearranged to create well-balanced combinatorial libraries.
Here's a recent Nucleic Acids Research publication that describes use of the platform for plasmid sequencing and library demultiplexing.