| The Synthetic Biology Engineering
Research Center (SynBERC) is spearheading a new effort called the BIOFAB:
International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BioFAB) to produce
thousands of free, standardized DNA parts to shorten the development time
and lower the cost of synthetic biology for academic or biotech industry
laboratories. The effort to characterize thousands of control elements
critical to the engineering of microbes will help enable researchers to
mix and match these DNA parts in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs,
fuels, or chemicals.
The NSF-funded SynBERC received
from NSF two years worth of budget support for BioFAB along with matching
support from founding partners Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
and the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), a non-profit organization that supports
and promotes the use of synthetic biology. Leading contributors to
BioFAB’s founding include co-director Adam Arkin, a professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, where SynBERC is headquartered; co-director Drew
Endy, an assistant professor at Stanford University; and BioFAB executive
committee chair Jay Keasling, a professor at UC Berkeley and Director of
SynBERC.
Once fully operational, the
BioFAB facility will be capable of producing tens of thousands of professionally
engineered, high-quality standard biological parts each year. From
the beginning, BioFAB will enable the rapid design and prototyping of genetic
constructs needed to support specific SynBERC testbeds, while also producing
broadly useful collections of standard biological parts that can be made
freely available to both academic and commercial users. The BioFAB
will thus also represent the first significant focused investment in the
development of “open technology” platforms underlying and supporting the
next generation of biotechnology.
This professionally staffed
research and production facility aims to design, construct, measure, and
test high-quality standardized genetic components and engineered biological
systems. The launch goals of the facility are: to develop complete
sets of open source genetic components sufficient to engineer the “central
dogma” within most biotechnologically-important microbes; and to develop
a rapid prototyping service sufficient to quickly assemble and characterize
small systems from such parts on demand using emerging tools and technologies
in genetic engineering, automation, measurement, computation, and information
science.
The BioFAB facility is developing
an open membership architecture so that additional universities, companies,
and non-profits can readily partner and sponsor the BioFAB via grants,
direct gifts, and in-kind donations. The facility hopes to serve as a leading
worldwide example for how partnerships and sharing can enable industry
while at the same time transforming a technology. |
