Chain Blue Lightning™ Gene Synthesis Platform
Gene Synthesis emerged as a more rapid and dynamic alternative tool for genetic manipulation by the beginning of the millennium and has become a vital part of Blue Sky’s service pipeline. Gene Synthesis is the in vitro process of taking single nucleotide building blocks or small oligonucleotides and systematically assembling them into a gene of defined sequence. Blue Sky developed its own methods in 2004 to meet emerging market needs and continues to improve the Chain Blue Lightning process.
Gene Synthesis departs from the traditional cloning methods in a few key ways:
- Unlike traditional cloning, one can engineer a gene so it is tailored to the host organism, such as taking a human gene and tailoring it to bacterial preferences, thus allowing the gene to be expressed in greater abundance and perhaps a more conducive protein form for downstream study.
- A scientist can plan a modular strategy for gene construction from pieces to final full-length gene (from blocks to the final structure), whereas with traditional cloning the plan is reversed and more cumbersome (using final structures, deconstructing to new blocks, reconstructing blocks into final structures).
- It is often faster.
- It is usually more economical.
TeraPrep™ Bulk Plasmid DNA Platform
TeraPrep™ processes are unique standardized methods developed at Blue Sky using a precise protocol that allows for extremely high purity bulk plasmid purified from E. coli cells. Bulk plasmid preparation has been in existence for 20 years but defined protocols and routine demand for bulk (>1 milligram) of pure DNA in basic R&D has not been popular until recent scientific advances (within the last decade) in cell culture, in particular the advances in utility of recombinant proteins produced using suspension mammalian cell culture. Drug R&D labs now demand 1–500 mg of highly pure plasmid DNA for their research studies.
Blue Sky can turn around TeraPreps in a range of sizes: 1 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg, 100 mg, etc., typically within a one-week time frame. Blue Sky’s method employs Liquid Chromatographic separation technologies that produce very pure (high resolution) DNA. As a general rule bulk plasmid preparations enable efficient transfection for recombinant protein expression in larger suspension mammalian cell reactors, such as 10–100 L wave bioreactors. As R&D investment increases in biological therapeutics (proteins, antibodies) production, there is increasing demand for high quality bulk plasmid preparations as tools to accelerate and increase the data quality of R&D projects.
