Starting with just a digital file, scientists manufactured the common flu virus.
MIT Technology Review said:The first biological teleporter sits in a lab on the lower level of the San Diego building that houses Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI), looking something like a super-sized equipment cart.
The device is actually conglomeration of small machines and lab robots, linked to each other to form one big machine. But this one can do something unprecedented: it can use transmitted digital code to print viruses.
In a series of experiments culminating last year, SGI scientists used genetic instructions sent to the device from elsewhere in the building to automatically manufacture the DNA of the common flu virus. They also produced a functional bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacterial cells.
Although that wasn’t the first time anyone had made a virus from DNA parts, it was the first time it was done automatically, without human hands.
The device, called a “digital-to-biological converter” was unveiled in May. Though still a prototype, instruments like it could one day broadcast biological information from sites of a disease outbreak to vaccine manufacturers, or print out on-demand personalized medicines at patients’ bedsides.
“We have been dreaming, for about a decade, of the ability to fax life forms,” says Juan Enriquez, an executive with Excel Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in SGI, who imagines a new Industrial Revolution with the “digital-biological converter” as the cotton gin.
Craig Venter, the renegade biologist who founded Synthetic Genomics in 2005, but no longer takes a day-to-day role in its activities, has said he even thinks it will be possible to transmit life forms between planets.
“He’s talked to Elon Musk” about it, says Dan Gibson, SGI’s vice president for DNA Technology.
Flu viruses
Unlike Venter, known for boasts and big scientific plans, Gibson is understated, although also well-known among biologists for “Gibson Assembly,” a reaction that joins small pieces of lab-made DNA into much larger genes.
SGI’s BioXP 3200, a commercial DNA printer, forms the heart of the digital-to-biological converter. When Gibson, sitting in his office, sends a message to the converter, it begins its work using pre-loaded chemicals. He could just as easily send such a message from anywhere.
In late May, Gibson’s team disclosed how they’d used the device to create DNA, RNA, proteins, and viruses “in an automated fashion from digitally transmitted DNA sequences without human intervention.”
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