Twist biosciences $TWST is one of the major success stories in the business of biology and they're powering the new revolution in synthetic biology.

Synthetic biology is a field of science that involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities.

How Does It Work? (I'm an investor, not a scientist!)

Scientists typically stitch together long stretches of DNA and insert them into an organism's genome. These synthesized pieces of DNA could be genes that are found in other organisms or they could be entirely novel.

Can You Give Me An Example?

Microorganisms harnessed for their ability to break down a huge range of organic compounds and absorb inorganic substances in order to clean pollutants from our water, soil, and air.

Rice modified to produce beta-carotene, a nutrient usually associated with carrots, that prevents vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in 250k-500k children every year and greatly increases a child's risk of death from infectious diseases.

I Like Examples, Do Me One More!

Yeast engineered to produce rose oil as an eco-friendly and sustainable substitute for real rose that perfumers use to make luxury scents

Co-founders Emily Leproust, Bill Peck, and Bill Banyai were talking to a friend who was buying a lot of DNA. There were delays, they weren't getting what they wanted, and it was super expensive. Emily and the Bill realized that DNA synthesis was a big market with unhappy customers. So they invented a technology that was much better at serving customer needs than what was out there at the time.

What Did They Invent?

To understand what they made you have to have a cursory understanding of microplates, photolithography, and liquid handling robots. Don't bail now! You are capable of understanding the relevant parts:

Microplates are a flat plate with multiple "wells" used as small test tubes. The microplate has become a standard tool in analytical research and clinical diagnostic testing laboratories.

Photolithography is a process used to make extremely small structures.

This procedure is comparable to a high precision version of the method used to make printed circuit boards. Photolithography provides precise control of the shape and size of the objects it creates and can create patterns over an entire surface cost-effectively.

Twist is essentially making microplates like the ones pictured above, but an extremely miniaturized version reminiscent of computer circuit boards, and look like the one pictured below:

A liquid handling robot is used to automate workflows in life science laboratories. It is a robot that dispenses a selected quantity of liquid to a designated container.

Combining these three things, they were able to build the technology to read and write DNA onto silicon.

Throughput and cost. The DNA market was already doing fine on quality, after-all, cloned DNA is by definition a perfect copy. But the big pain points were how long it took to create the DNA and how much it costed.

In 2017 when Twist Biosciences started selling DNA it was 25 cents a base (aka a rung of the DNA ladder). If your gene is a 1,000 base pairs, the cost was high enough that you may do the cloning yourself. And this wasn't scalable. You could buy a gene or two, but if you wanted to do a high throughput experiment with 100 genes, you would have to wait a long time. If you wanted 1,000 genes, forget it. Even if you had the budget, it would take months and months to get thousands of genes.

Twist is a hardware platform company. They have ported DNA chemistry onto silicon and can essentially print DNA onto these silicon wafers. This miniaturized chemistry allows for increased throughput and decreased cost. And that is exactly what the market needed- to make more DNA at lower cost.

That is the high level overview of what Twist does, I will be writing more in the future about their business, so be sure to give a follow if you want to keep learning!