Re: Singularity in 18 months?/ hardware fab latency

Gina Miller (nanogirl@halcyon.com)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 23:29:02 -0700

It depends on the size of the protein sequence that you want, for small peptides like less then 50 amino acid residues it's very efficient to synthesize them chemically. You can get gram quanities of peptide after purification, on the other hand if you want to make a fifty thousand dalton protein that is about 500 amino acid residues then you have to express it in a biological system. There are many different vectors to use in biological expression and yields vary enormously for different proteins, and you almost always have to do a lot of purification. So it depends on how big a gene, which protein, how much you need, if you need it over and over again, and how much work this particular protein is to purify. Gina "Nanogirl" Miller

>Gina Miller writes:
> > About this DNA gig, don't get the dna synthesized, that gives you a
strand
> > of dna, if you want the protein sequence that that represents then you
write
> > down the sequence of the protein and send it to somebody with a protein
> > synthesizer to synthesize that peptide. If you what you want is the
protein
>
>Problem is: you'll get not a protein, but a peptide. A dirty one. In
>microquantities. At very low yield, the longer, the lower.
>
>If you'd get the DNA instead, and manage to transfect an organism, and
>it gets expressed sufficiently you have a potentially infinite source
>of that particular protein. Teach a man to fish...
>
> > there is no reason to synthesize the dna.