AT TWIST BIOSCIENCE’S office in San Francisco, CEO Emily Leproust pulled out of her tote bag two things she carries around everywhere: a standard 96-well plastic plate ubiquitous in biology labs and her company’s invention, a silicon wafer studded with a similar number of nanowells.
Twist’s pitch is that it has dramatically scaled down the equipment for synthesizing DNA in a lab, making the process cheaper and faster. As Leproust gave her spiel, I looked from the jankety plastic plate, the size of two decks of cards side by side, to the sleek stamp-sized silicon wafer and politely nodded along. Then she handed me a magnifying lens to look down the wafer’s nanowells. Inside each nanowell was another 100 microscope holes.
That’s when I actually got it. The 96-well plate was not equivalent to the wafer, the entire plate was equivalent to one nanowell on the wafer. To put a number on it, traditional DNA synthesis machines can make one gene per 96-well plate; Twist’s machine can make 10,000 genes on a silicon wafer set the same size as the plate.