Blue Heron’s big genes

When I last blogged about Blue Heron in Bothell, it was being sued for patent infringement (see the March 15 and 16 posts below). Today, the small enterprise had better news: It’s succeeded in creating a gene with 52,000 base pairs.

That’s beyond the company’s usual creations of 20,000 to 40,000 base pairs. For comparison, genes in mammals can be made up of several hundred thousand base pairs.

Here’s Blue Heron’s short and to-the-point announcement: http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070326005334&newsLang=en or http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=14809010.

Key quote: “Where we have routinely delivered sequences up to 20kb in length to date, we are very excited about making much longer genes a standard part of our offering,” said Dorene Farnham, Blue Heron’s director of sales &marketing.