BioFoundry: Center for Robust, Equitable and Accessible Technology and Education (CREATE) for Next Generation BioFoundries

Biotechnology and biomanufacturing show great promise for expanding beyond human health applications, to address climate and energy goals, improve food security, secure the domestic supply chain, promote rural economic development, and grow the nation’s economy. These capabilities are enabled by the ability of scientists and engineers to design and build biological systems to perform new tasks with high efficiency, such as converting renewable domestically produced feedstocks into chemicals, fuels, and materials, or fixing nitrogen to reduce fertilizer use in food production. However, the scale at which these biological systems are currently designed, built, and tested, suffer from long cycle times, limited scale, high cost, and frequent unexpected behavior. Centralized BioFoundries that leverage automation to scale up biodesign building and testing are becoming more common but are very expensive to operate and maintain and have a limited user base. To start to increase the scale at which biodesign, building, and testing is done at a fraction of the cost, this project brings together a team to establish The Center for Robust, Equitable and Accessible Technology and Education (CREATE) for Next Generation BioFoundries The mission of CREATE is to democratize and decentralize the BioFoundry, and ultimately empower individual scientists and engineers to leverage scale to accelerate scientific discovery and biotechnology translation. CREATE will empower the community through accessible and user-friendly technology development that makes biofoundry operations faster, higher throughput, and less resource intensive. CREATE will also develop educational and workforce development tools to prepare the community for this new way of scaling biotechnology. Support from this award will advance three technological approaches that facilitate designing biological systems at scale, at a lower cost than conventional methods. Large genetic system libraries will be built by massively parallel genetic system assembly from low-cost oligo pools, combined with the design of very large synthetic metabolic pathways that systematically vary enzymes and their expression levels, and massively parallel development for cellular sensors for metabolites. These methods will be applied to pilot projects involving protein material production, bacteriophage engineering, and microbial cell factories. Specific challenges addressed in these projects include low cost gene synthesis for enzyme discovery and phage assembly, for pathway optimization, for lignocellulosic inhibitor detoxification, and for discovery of novel metabolite biosensors for metabolites. Education and workforce development efforts will produce a draft of a curriculum for “High Throughput Thinking in Biotechnology“, a course to train biotechnologists not to be limited by throughput and scale. A virtual design-build-test tool will also be adapted for undergraduate and graduate education. CREATE will engage with the community to prioritize sensor development and identify future users of CREATE resources. This award is jointly funded by the Directorates of Biological Sciences (BIO), Engineering (ENG) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.