Understanding and Using Isothermal Gene Assembly for Synthetic Biology

Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) provides a unique insight into the fundamentals of isothermal synthetic gene assembly in this quarter’s edition of the company’s Decoded newsletter.

The technique, which was pioneered in 2009 by Daniel Gibson and colleagues at The J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland, USA, allows several overlapping DNA fragments to be combined in a single reaction.

In this way, large synthetic DNA molecules many hundreds of kilobases long can be generated using a minimal number of enzymatic steps.

This limits potential errors due to repeated handling of samples and reagents, while simplifying the process by avoiding the need for multiple experimental setups.

The article in the latest issue of Decoded outlines the theory behind isothermal assembly, and provides advice for designing and creating synthetic gene constructs using the method.

Users can read more about the latest genomic trends, tips and research in the most recent issue of IDT’s quarterly newsletter, Decoded.

IDT has also released its new gBlock Gene Fragments, which simplify, speed up and reduce the cost of creating large, custom DNA constructs.