• A new “catching-by-polymerization” (CBP) purification workflow now enables direct chemical synthesis of kilobase-scale DNA: 800-mer GFP and 1,728-mer Φ29 DNA polymerase genes have been produced, isolated, and sequence-verified by Sanger sequencing, representing a 4× jump in routine oligo length.  
• The CBP method tags only full-length strands with a polymerizable phosphoramidite, incorporates them into a polyacrylamide gel, washes away truncated products, then chemically cleaves the pure long oligos; scalable syntheses of the required tagging reagents have also been published.  
• To support these extreme lengths, researchers moved synthesis from porous CPG to smooth glass beads and glass wool, dramatically reducing steric hindrance and reagent volume—an apparently obvious switch that had not been tried before.  
• A parallel advance, Dim-Dmoc protection chemistry, allows mild, non-nucleophilic deprotection of oligos using sodium periodate oxidation followed by aniline-induced β-elimination, preserving sensitive modifications that standard ammonia treatment would destroy.  
• A Caltech team demonstrated “programmed RNA origami,” showing that RNA strands can be algorithmically designed to self-fold into prescribed nanoscale shapes, expanding the toolkit for structural nucleic-acid nanotechnology.  
• A Science Advances paper reports that KIBRA’s anchoring of PKMζ is required for the persistence of most long-term memories (except fear memory), reopening debate on the molecular basis of memory maintenance and potential cognitive-enhancement targets.  
• A curated thread of open protein-design resources (datasets, software, and model weights) was circulated, aimed at accelerating community-driven de-novo protein engineering.