DNA Synthesis

Along with the phage idea from a few days ago, I was thinking about how you would synthesize really big pieces of DNA with a novel sequence from scratch. Obviously we can produce oligos but it’s just not practicle (nor feasible I would think) to build really long pieces this way. I can’t remember if this is an idea i had or (more likely) something someone else came up with and I just can’t recall where I’ve seen it before.

You could synthesize a lot of oligos (maybe 20-mers) for your sequence and the complementary strand. The oligo would be designed such that the breaks in one strand fall in the middle of an oligo for the other strand, crudely diagrammed thusly:

BBBBBBBBBB BBBBBBBBBB BBBBBBBBBB
BBBBB BBBBBBBBB BBBBBBBBBB BBBBB

For best results, the gaps could even span multiple bases in the antisense strand. Mix with some PolIII and ligase, repeat until sufficiently long DNA.

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