Week 2 – Lecture Prep

AI generated

Questions

1. What’s the most commonly used method for oligo synthesis currently?

Answer: The most commonly used method for oligo synthesis today is phosphoramidite DNA synthesis.

2. Why is it difficult to make oligos longer than 200nt via direct synthesis?

Answer: It is difficult because each chemical synthesis step has less than 100% efficiency, errors accumulate with length, making oligos longer than ~200 nt unreliable.

3. Why can’t you make a 2000bp gene via direct oligo synthesis?

Answer: Chemical DNA synthesis has an error rate of about 1 in 100 bases, and the errors accumulate over 2000 bases, so it is impossible to obtain a correct full‑length gene through direct synthesis.