2.2 The Synthetic Biology Revolution Summary

summary

DNA synthesizers create physical molecules of DNA from scratch.
The cost of DNA synthesis has dramatically dropped from $4/base in 2003 to $0.04/base in 2015, and is expected to continue to decrease.
The price per base pair of DNA synthesis appears to follow Moore’s Law—the capacity to read and write DNA is improving, while the cost of DNA sequencing and synthesis is decreasing.
Computation with natural materials is difficult because the materials need to be regularized and interchangeable.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition has been pioneering open source synthetic biology.