Geneticists at the new Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology to build a genomic smartwatch

It's been at least twenty years since the first fitness tracking smartwatches hit the market. Nowadays, we take for granted the convenience of tracking stats like heart rate and blood pressure, despite regular reports of lives saved by smartwatch technology.

However, this sort of real-time tracking has not been possible at the genetic level. Scientists can only see the end-results of genetic change after debilitating diseases such as cancer have ravaged a cell. This is the challenge that a new research hub based in Seattle aims to solve with a 'genomic smartwatch'.

The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology is the brainchild of the Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the University of Washington. This collaboration is meant to use techniques at the frontiers of genetic research such as single-cell multiomics and AI-enhanced gene modification to record the inner workings of a cell's genome. While these traditional methods have improved scientists' understanding of the processes behind gene expression, the research initiative of the Seattle Hub aims to make the entire history of the cell accessible.