An automated colony picking system for DNA assembly for synthetic biology
Abstract
Abstract Biological systems hold promise as engineering platforms for applications across a wide variety of areas of interest to DoD, including sensing, environmental remediation, and the production of highvalue chemicals, materials, and therapeutics. A key challenge to realizing this potential lies in determining how to encode effective genetic programs. To this end, our research focusses both on developing new genetic design strategies for biological systems (including research funded by ONR, ARO, and DARPA) and on developing infrastructure for rapid-prototyping to refine these strategies via accelerated design feedback (currently funded by DARPA). Our efforts in both genetic design and rapid-prototyping rely heavily on large-scale screening of cells containing engineered DNA. This screening frequently takes the form of assessing growth in petri plates. A typical experiment in our laboratory generates hundreds of these plates. Each one is generated, analyzed, and manipulated by hand to isolate individual cell colonies. In this proposal, we request support for an automated colony-picking system to replace this laborious manual process. Such a system will eliminate manual picking errors and increase the productivity of scientists in the lab. More importantly, by combining such a system with a new miniaturization strategy that we have developed for plating, we can increase our throughput by two orders of magnitude while simultaneously reducing plating and picking costs. The requested equipment would support numerous DoD projects both in our primary research lab within MITÕs Synthetic Biology Center and within our production facility, the MIT-Broad Foundry. The equipment will also support the educational goals of the Department of Defense by supporting laboratory training for graduate students and postdoctoral associates and the Broad InstituteÕs Education and Outreach Program. In addition, it will be available to undergraduate students participating in the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, and to students taking MITÕs bioengineering senior design course.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 22, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141512805
Entities
People
- Christopher Voigt
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy