Recommended gene synthesis providers?

June 15, 2011 2:04 PM

Biologists of MeFi: do you have experience with custom gene synthesis? If so, which providers do you recommend?

Specifically, I'd like to get a dozen genes just under 1kb synthesized. I'd like to keep it cheap, but I want to get the right sequence too. Just googling, the cost seems to vary by 2-fold. Are some providers better than others, or should I just go with the cheapest?

posted by pombe to Science & Nature (11 answers total)

I've ordered oligos of various lengths from MWG Operon/Eurofins (www.operon.com) and had no problems. I also use the company for sequencing. So far the quality of the oligos and the service have both been top notch. I've never ordered anything even close to as long as 1 kb, though.
posted by Cygnet at 2:59 PM on June 15, 2011

I have had good results for both simple and complex gene syntheses, including several much longer than 1kb, using either DNA2.0 or Geneart
posted by hdfische at 3:58 PM on June 15, 2011

When we needed large synthetic oligos for cloning (about 700 bp, I think), we designed overlapping constructs for each strand that were around 200 bp and had sticky ends. Here's an attempt to illustrate:

|------Oligo 1-----------||-------Oligo 2------------||-------Oligo 3------------| Sense strand
|----------Oligo 4--------------||--------Oligo 5-----------||---------Oligo 6---| Antisense strand

We got them from Sigma (very, very cheap and much higher yields than longer oligos) then annealed them in annealing buffer and ligated with T4 ligase – you can skip the ligation step if you're transforming bacteria, the nicks gets taken care of in the cell.

I believe we researched alternatives extensively, and this was the cheapest way to do it. It's quite straighforward (word of advice: label your oligos in a way that makes sense to the person doing the actual work) worked perfectly.
posted by halogen at 4:22 PM on June 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

I've had good service from IDT, which is quoting $0.55/bp.
posted by Durin's Bane at 4:24 PM on June 15, 2011

We have used IDT and DNA2.0 for gene fragments ~500bp. Both will verify the sequence and any errors will be repaired before shipping.

We were pleased with both providers but from memory, IDT was cheaper.
posted by Shal at 4:59 PM on June 15, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers so far. Does anyone have any experience with Genscript? A friend of mine at Stanford says good things about it.
posted by pombe at 5:31 PM on June 15, 2011

I've used DNA2.0 and IDT, both with good success. Never genscript, sorry.
posted by lab.beetle at 6:25 PM on June 15, 2011

Nthing IDT. It's all we used in the biochem lab I worked in after college for a while.
posted by kthxbi at 11:20 PM on June 15, 2011

We've sent quite a bit of stuff to genscript in the range you describe, and had good experience with them. My boss has dealt worth them more than I have, and he was happy enough to send another big order recently.

I've been told that geneart are very good, although I haven't used them myself. They're now part of invitrogen but, judging by the email addresses, it's still the same people actually working there. Their web interface for submitting jobs is terrible though, I had a hard time getting a quote from them.

I seem to remember that Mr Gene looked quite cheap, but they didn't reply to my email so I didn't end up using them.

I haven't used IDT for gene synthesis, but our lab gets all of or primers from them and they give us excellent service. If they offered a good price I'd feel confident going with them.
posted by metaBugs at 12:22 AM on June 16, 2011

In our case, the two middle oligos were the same for all constructs (50-ish total, I think), so we only had to order four oligos per construct for a total of $40 or so.
posted by halogen at 11:14 PM on June 17, 2011

Response by poster: I think we are like to use DNA2.0, largely because of the optimization they do. Thanks for all the comments.
posted by pombe at 5:30 PM on July 17, 2011