Inscripta introduced benchtop platform for digital genome engineering, featuring software, consumables, an instrument, and assays for precisely engineering libraries of single cells
Image: Inscripta has introduced the world's first benchtop platform for digital genome engineering. Photo: Courtesy of Business Wire.
Gene-editing technology provider Inscripta has launched the Onyx Digital Genome Engineering platform, a fully automated benchtop instrument for genome-scale engineering.
In addition, the Genome Engineering platform marks the first benchtop platform in the world for scalable digital genome engineering, and offers a fully automated workflow for trackable editing of single cells.
Inscripta CEO Kevin Ness said: “At Inscripta, we believe that biology has unlimited potential to positively change the world. We are inspired by the ambitious experiments our early access collaborators have run with our platform and are proud to see the impact our technology is already having on the synthetic biology field.
“CRISPR-based gene editing technology has the potential to transform our ability to precisely engineer genomes, but it has not yet fully delivered on this promise due to significant limitations. The Onyx platform overcomes these limitations and will give all scientists the power to design, engineer, evaluate, and track results of powerful genome engineering experiments in their own lab.”
The platform enables researchers to engineer microbial libraries in their own labs
The new Onyx Digital Genome Engineering platform is a Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-mediated platform that features software, consumables, instrument, and assays.
The new genome engineering platform is designed to offer immediate and significant benefits to support bio-industrial materials development and manufacturing, genome discovery, healthcare, and sustainability.
Inscripta said that before the commercial release of its product, it has started collaborations with significant academia and industry leaders across the world, through an early access programme.
In addition, the company has made its MAD7 CRISPR nuclease available free for research and development purposes to enable scientists to experience the new era of biological discovery.
Inscripta claims that it aims to empower scientists whose gene editing research is stifled by current technical and licensing limitations.
One of the company’s early access users, Willow Biosciences commercial operations vice-president Chris Savile said: “Inscripta’s technology enables us to generate and screen large libraries of precisely edited strains on a scale never seen before. Our heterologous pathway and strain engineering efforts benefit greatly from the reduced cycle times and increased learnings offered by the platform.
“These unparalleled capabilities will be used to accelerate our microbial R&D programs and shorten time to market. We believe that this technology will transform the capabilities of genome writing and enable researchers to focus their efforts on testing multiple biological hypotheses in parallel without having to outsource their experiments or spend precious time and resources on the laborious task of optimizing complex gene editing methods.”