David L. Heiner

Fully Automated Parallel Oligonucleotide Synthesizer

The oligonucleotide and peptide synthesis technology is of major strategic importance in the field of genomics and proteomics. Commercially available single channel synthesizers cannot satisfy the demand of emerging technologies. Currently, there are several instruments for parallel synthesis of oligonucleotides such as: (i) a 96-channel instrument based on a microtiter plate format developed by scientists at Stanford University [1]; (ii) PolyPlex machine produced by the company GeneMachines [2]; or synthesizer using two microtiterplates for simultaneous synthesis of 192 oligonucleotides, developed at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and sold under name MerMade by company BioAutomation [3]. While these technologies meet the modest requirements of most experiments today, they are inadequate for the manufacturing needs looming in the very near future. Current synthesis technologies do not meet the need for manufacturing large numbers of oligonucleotides (tens of thousands to millions of sequences) cost-effectively. Our goal was to fill this gap and build the parallel (and economical) synthesizer capable of preparation of needed numbers of oligonucleotides.