Biologist George Church of Harvard University has developed a way to speed up genetic engineering with a technology his group calls “multiplex automated genetic engineering,” or MAGE.

“Automated sequencing really advanced the way we can read genetic information. We hope automated genome engineering will advance the way we write genetic information,” Harvard biophysicist Harris Wang told Wired.com, explaining the team’s motivation for developing MAGE.

Church’s team first ordered synthetic nucleotides that contained slightly altered sequences of DNA that are part of a 24-gene pathway in Escherichia coli bacteria. Then the team zapped E. coli with an electric shock, perforating their outer membranes so that random assortments of the synthetic nucleotides could enter the bacteria.

The team then picked bacteria that incorporated sequences that boosted their production of the antioxidant lycopene, and repeated the process over and over to select for good lycopene producers. After three days, the process yielded 15 billion genetically variant bacteria, some of which produced 5 times as much lycopene as normal.

The research was published on 26 July in Nature.

Achieving the same feat using traditional genetic engineering methods would take months or years, Church’s group said. He predicted that MAGE could revolutionize the process of genetic engineering in a variety of industries, such as biotechnology.

“This automated, multiplex technology will allow labs to engineer entire pathways and genomes and take cell programming to a whole new level,” Church said in a press release.