Caltech synthetic biologist Kaihang Wang unveiled Sidewinder, a DNA assembly method that can stitch together dozens of sequences in a single tube. The technique achieves an error rate of one mistake per 10 million joins, dwarfing conventional chemistries that slip once every 10‑30 connections. By tagging each oligo with a unique barcode, Sidewinder forces fragments to pair only with their intended neighbors.

The advance addresses a bottleneck exposed by generative AI tools such as Evo 2, which can design full‑length genomes in minutes but leave labs waiting weeks for physical synthesis. Wang’s team demonstrated the workflow by redesigning a 12,500‑base E. coli segment in silico and assembling it error‑free with Sidewinder, a feat that would have taken over a month using standard commercial services.

To move the technology out of academia, Wang, postdoc Noah Robinson, Stanford’s Brian Hie and entrepreneur Adrian Woolfson founded Genyro, which plans to license Sidewinder to pharma and biotech firms while keeping an academic‑friendly tier. If widely adopted, researchers could prototype metabolic pathways, drug‑producing microbes, or even synthetic genomes in days rather than months, reshaping how AI‑generated DNA moves from screen to test tube.