Craig Bartling

Abstract Screening of nucleic acid synthesis orders is expanding to include short, single-stranded DNA orders in efforts to ensure potentially harmful genes and genomes cannot be synthesized by illegitimate or irresponsible customers. Short sequence fragments are not as information rich as gene sequences, typically require assembly to be functional, and are much cheaper to produce than genes.

Editor’s summary One way in which companies and governments can limit potentially harmful biological research is by restricting the commercial synthesis of DNA that encodes particular proteins or is from select pathogens. However, screening methods are not necessarily designed to detect engineered sequences. Wittmann et al.

, , Kevin Flyangolts, Craig Bartling, Bryan Gemler, Jacob Beal, Tessa Alexanian, Nicole Wheeler, Krista Ternus, Todd Treangen, Gene D. Godbold, Michael Nute, Leonard Foner, , Jens Berlips Nucleic acid synthesis is a dual-use technology that can benefit fields such as biology, medicine, and information storage. However, synthetic nucleic acids could also potentially be used negligently and ultimately cause harm, or be used with malicious intent to cause harm.