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Strengths and limitations of the federal guidance on synthetic DNA

Nature Biotechnology volume 29, pages 208–210 (2011)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

The December issue included a report summarizing the first reactions of the gene synthesis industry to the publication of the US government Screening Framework Guidance for Providers of Synthetic Double-Stranded DNA1. Some of the questions raised by the federal guidance had already been exposed in your columns2,3, but none of these previous comments relied on a bioinformatics analysis of the screening protocol proposed by the US government. Here we present the preliminary results of an implementation of this protocol with the hope of documenting the strengths and limitations of the federal guidance.

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Figure 1: Sequence screening algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Award no. 1060776 to Virginia Tech. L.A. was supported by a graduate fellowship from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). M.K., A.S., O.M., G.L. and T.S. were supported by undergraduate research fellowships from the MITRE Corporation.

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  1. Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

    Laura Adam, Michael Kozar, Gaelle Letort, Olivier Mirat, Arunima Srivastava, Tyler Stewart, Mandy L Wilson & Jean Peccoud

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  1. Laura Adam
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  2. Michael Kozar
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  3. Gaelle Letort
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  7. Mandy L Wilson
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  8. Jean Peccoud
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Correspondence to Jean Peccoud.

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Adam, L., Kozar, M., Letort, G. et al. Strengths and limitations of the federal guidance on synthetic DNA. Nat Biotechnol 29, 208–210 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.1802

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