Evonetix, the Cambridge-based company pioneering an innovative approach to enable scalable and high-fidelity gene synthesis, has been awarded substantial funding to support the development of a novel enzymatic approach to DNA synthesis. Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, will co-fund the £1.3 million project, which will be undertaken in collaboration with Durham University.
Evonetix is revolutionising gene synthesis with the aim of producing DNA at scale to facilitate many
applications in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology. Evonetix’s novel silicon array, combined with its unique synergistic thermal control chemistry and process of error detection throughout assembly, permits massive parallelism in de novo DNA synthesis, enabling high-throughput on-chip assembly of high-fidelity gene-length DNA at scale.
As part of the Innovate UK co-funded project, Evonetix will develop a novel enzymatic approach to gene synthesis and integrate it into its proprietary, thermally addressable silicon array. The research will be directed by Dr Raquel Sanches-Kuiper (Director of Biology, Evonetix [pictured]), whose group will develop engineered enzymes that are able to incorporate modified nucleotides efficiently. The group of Dr David Hodgson (Associate Professor of Chemistry, Durham University) will develop the modified nucleotides for enzymatic synthesis in Evonetix’s silicon array.