Twist Bioscience

Twist Bioscience is a synthetic biology company headquartered in South San Francisco, California, that has developed a silicon-based DNA synthesis platform enabling the manufacture of synthetic DNA at a scale, speed, and cost that was previously unachievable. Founded in 2013 by Emily Leproust and colleagues, Twist's platform performs electrochemical synthesis of oligonucleotides on a silicon chip with 9,600 independent synthesis clusters per chip, producing up to 1 million base pairs of DNA per run at costs orders of magnitude lower than traditional column-based synthesis. Researchers use Twist's synthetic genes for protein engineering studies, pathway construction in metabolic engineering, DNA data storage experiments, and as building blocks for large combinatorial libraries. Their Twist Library Preparation kits for NGS are designed to maximize on-target sequencing efficiency. The Twist Exome Research Panel and custom capture panels are used for targeted whole-exome and gene panel sequencing in clinical and population genomics research. Twist's antibody discovery libraries, including their human synthetic antibody library and custom naive and immune libraries, enable phage display and other selection-based antibody discovery programs. The company also offers variant library synthesis for deep mutational scanning studies, enabling researchers to characterize the functional consequences of all possible amino acid changes in a protein of interest. Their biopharma partnerships for antibody library generation and gene fragment supply position them centrally in the synthetic biology supply chain.