The kind of DNA-based nanotechnology pioneered by New York University’s Ned Seeman is currently the closest thing we have to the radical aim of making nanoscale structures and machines with atomic precision, but the development of the technology is limited by cost. DNA is an expensive molecule – currently it costs about $5000 a gram to make short, synthetic DNA sequences.
The cost of synthetic DNA has been dropping, but a new company is promising orders of magnitude drops in cost for much longer sequences of DNA. The company, Codon Devices, is commercialising methods developed in George Church’s group at Harvard Medical School – the method is describe in this Nature paper (subscription required for full paper): Accurate multiplex gene synthesis from programmable DNA microchips.
It’s not DNA nanotechnology that the company cites as its major potential market, though. Their ambition is to make synthetic genes for synthetic organisms, in the emerging field of synthetic biology.