Gene design

Several biotech companies provide gene synthesis services at an affordable price ($0.5 ~ $0.8 per basepair). We can design any DNA sequence and synthesize a whole gene instead of using natural genes. Moreover, we can easily redesign original DNA sequence to improve gene expression. There are a lot of published papers that demonstrated higher gene expression after sequence optimization and it is generally known that gene optimization regarding codon usage, UTR (untranslated region), mRNA structure, or intron can improve gene expression very significantly. Due to the reason, synthetic gene design has been a new emerging research area.

Codon optimization

Most species have different preferred codons for the amino acid expression. The idea is that unfavorable codons can be replaced with favorable codons for a host organism while maintaining the expression of the same amino acids.