Team:Cooper Union/TdT project

From 2014.igem.org

We are creating a novel microfluidic de novo synthesizer that will allow the general public to synthesize a personalized strand of DNA without the use of a template strand.

De novo synthesis is a way of creating DNA oligonucleotides without template strand. Since the conventional method is expensive, time consuming, and inefficient, our team wants to focus on the ways to minimize the time and money required for DNA synthesis and to allow the labs to produce oligonucleotides easily without ordering. Terminal Deoxynucleotidyl Transferase, also referred as TdT, is an enzyme found in bovine cells. It has the ability to add nucleotides to single stranded oligos, while other DNA enzymes can only add a nucleotide to double stranded ones.

To understand how TdT works, one has to understand the enzymes and its activities. Enzyme is a biological catalyst that aids chemical reaction and are mostly made of proteins. While it is specific to act on either forward or reverse reaction, it decreases the activation energy of a reaction to influence on rate of the reaction, without altering any other conditions or equilibrium constants.