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May 27, 2013 10:50 am GMT
When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard. But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave. A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA. Like the old Microsoft-Intel relationship of the PC era, they believe they have the symbiotic relationship necessary to usher in a new era where anybody can inexpensively create their own life forms. Genome Compiler is backed with $3 million in funding, including $2 million from Autodesk. Cambrian is funded by Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures and Draper Associates. “We are democratizing creation,” said Genome Compiler co-founder Omri Amirav-Drory. “Cells are nothing more than a computer, running a program and the program is the genetic code. The code is DNA. The software are the chromosomes. The hardware is the wetware.” Using Drory’s software, a person can load up existing sequences for different life forms like plants and then manipulate them by inserting or taking out various genes. It corrects the code for basic errors like not having three codes for an amino acid or having a stop and a start code in the wrong place. “Wouldn’t it be nice in the future if someone could just load up a tree’s genetic code, drag another app from a file and make it glow in the dark?” said Amirav-Drory, who was a post-doc at Stanford University after completing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In theory they could eventually build an app store where a Genome Compiler user could buy access to genetic code that might make a plant sells like a banana. One Kickstarter project which I wrote about last month is already using the software to create a glow-in-the-dark plant. The seemingly far-fetched aspiration is to eventually replace street lights with the more renewable solution of glowing trees. Environmental considerations were what originally drew Amirav-Drory toward starting Genome Compiler. “We live in a civilization that is totally dependent on finite resources like oil and coal to produce everything around
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eSTxB8IgwMA/
Bio-Hackers, Get Ready
When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard. But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code — the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave. A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA. Like the old Microsoft-Intel relationship of the PC era, they believe they have the symbiotic relationship necessary to usher in a new era where anybody can inexpensively create their own life forms. Genome Compiler is backed with $3 million in funding, including $2 million from Autodesk. Cambrian is funded by Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures and Draper Associates. “We are democratizing creation,” said Genome Compiler co-founder Omri Amirav-Drory. “Cells are nothing more than a computer, running a program and the program is the genetic code. The code is DNA. The software are the chromosomes. The hardware is the wetware.” Using Drory’s software, a person can load up existing sequences for different life forms like plants and then manipulate them by inserting or taking out various genes. It corrects the code for basic errors like not having three codes for an amino acid or having a stop and a start code in the wrong place. “Wouldn’t it be nice in the future if someone could just load up a tree’s genetic code, drag another app from a file and make it glow in the dark?” said Amirav-Drory, who was a post-doc at Stanford University after completing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In theory they could eventually build an app store where a Genome Compiler user could buy access to genetic code that might make a plant sells like a banana. One Kickstarter project which I wrote about last month is already using the software to create a glow-in-the-dark plant. The seemingly far-fetched aspiration is to eventually replace street lights with the more renewable solution of glowing trees. Environmental considerations were what originally drew Amirav-Drory toward starting Genome Compiler. “We live in a civilization that is totally dependent on finite resources like oil and coal to produce everything aroundOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eSTxB8IgwMA/
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