When researchers genetically engineer bacteria or yeast to solve a problem–creating bacteria that can eat plastic trash or make biofuel or insulin, or yeast that can make milk and cheese in a lab without a cow –one of the first steps can be the hardest: getting new DNA into a cell.

If a particular species hasn’t been engineered in the past, figuring out how to make its cells accept DNA can take months or even years. Actually inserting the DNA is equally tedious. Researchers typically use a manual process to pipette one sample of cells at a time into another chamber where the DNA is inserted, as they work to find a successful result among millions or billions of cells. A startup from MIT has new technology that can make that process 10,000 times faster.

“There’s been tremendous advances in writing DNA, tremendous advances in reading DNA, and tremendous advances in analyzing the data from the sequencing,” says Paulo Garcia, a research scientist at MIT and one of the cofounders of the startup, called Kytopen. “But the step where you actually put the DNA into the cells has been a bottleneck.”

The technology uses a tiny fluid channel, roughly the width of a human hair, that narrows in the center and is built into the tip of a pipette. As cells flow through the channel, an electrical charge opens pores in the cells so DNA can enter; the shape of the channel minimizes the time that the electric charge is highest, so it’s less likely that a cell will be zapped so hard that it won’t survive the process.

With current techniques, working with one sample of cells at a time, someone might be able to process 50 samples in an hour. The new system can process 96 or more samples at once, each with millions of cells, generating billions of new variants in minutes. Within an hour, it can process as much as an older system could do in a year.

“In genetic engineering, it’s hard to sit down in advance at a computer and type out the DNA code that’s going to produce the function that you want . . . what I need to do is either try some designs, see how they perform, and iterate on that process until I finally get to what I want,” says Barry Canton, founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, a company that uses microbes to design perfumes, flavors, and other products. “Or, it would be preferable if I can right at the start make 10,000 different designs, try them all, and immediately find one that works.” Gingko, which has a huge facility filled with robotics, could become more efficient using the new technology; for a typical lab, it could make even more of a difference.

The new technology could make it possible to work with many more species of bacteria or yeast than have been used in the past, because it also solves the problem of how to create the unique conditions that make a specific species accept DNA. Of the millions of species of bacteria that are estimated to exist, for example, Kytopen’s founders say that the scientific community has been able to grow or harvest only about 1%, and of those, genetic engineering has only been possible on another tiny fraction.