Achievement

The BioPACIFIC MIP Living Biofoundry (LBF) has been installed at UCLA and is now available to users. This automated, high-throughput platform for synthetic biology and microbial engineering enables the rapid production of bio-based monomers and polymers with precise repeat units, domains and chirality directly from microorganisms. The LBF offers leading-edge tools and workflows for gene assembly, amplification, transformation, strain growth, and metabolite analysis in a single, integrated platform.

 Importance of the Achievement

By providing a dedicated platform for automated pathway assembly at the gene level and metabolite detection at the cellular level, the Living Biofoundry will enable high-throughput discovery and engineering of new enzymes, commodity chemicals, and pharmaceuticals from renewable sources. Users of the LBF can also mine a data library of biosynthetic pathways to accelerate the discovery and scaled-up production of bioderived building blocks and biopolymers. The platform will uniquely provide the next-generation workforce hands-on training in industry-relevant technologies and empower the development of new research programs that leverage automated synthetic biology.