Project Update: COVID-19 DNA Synthesis

It’s been an intense and inspiring few weeks as our DNA synthesis team, Biofab, has been working hard to produce the first batch of SARS-CoV-2 protein constructs. This week, we sent the first 288 plasmids to Addgene and BioBricks Foundation, for distribution to academic and industrial labs.

The first set of plasmids consists of SARS-CoV-2 annotated proteins in E. coli and yeast vectors, with various C-terminal tags, suitable for protein expression and purification. We expect to send more from this set to Addgene and BioBricks Foundation each week, as well as mammalian expression constructs, additional Spike protein constructs for expression and VSV pseudotyping, and plasmids containing viral DNA. Check this repository for the full set of sequences already deposited and in our synthesis queue.

You should be able to access these sequences shortly from Addgene and BioBricks Foundation. If you have questions, other ideas, or a project that you think could benefit from access to Ginkgo’s foundries, please reach out to [email protected].

Posted by Benjie Chen