Benchmarking compares the performance of a product or service with a competitor. In a biofoundry context, capability benchmarking enables more effective use of development resources and furthering ...business development efforts. Biofoundries considering benchmarking activities are immediately faced with many implementation questions and decisions. While differing circumstances between biofoundries may lead to different answers to those same questions, a common framework for the benchmarking process is desirable. Perhaps the framework described here, and developed for the United States Department of Energy Agile BioFoundry, will be useful to other biofoundries around the world.
Microfluidic applications have expanded greatly over the past decade. For the most part, however, each microfluidics platform is developed with a specific task in mind, rather than as a ...general-purpose device with a wide-range of functionality. Here, we show how a microfluidic system, originally developed to investigate protein phase behavior, can be modified and repurposed for another application, namely DNA construction. We added new programable controllers to direct the flow of reagents across the chip. We designed the assembly of a combinatorial Golden Gate DNA library using TeselaGen DESIGN software and used the repurposed microfluidics platform to assemble the designed library from off-chip prepared DNA assembly pieces. Further experiments verified the sequences and function of the on-chip assembled DNA constructs.
Targeted proteomics is a convenient method determining enzyme expression levels, but a quantitative analysis of these proteomic data has not been fully explored yet. Here, we present and demonstrate ...a computational tool (principal component analysis of proteomics, PCAP) that uses quantitative targeted proteomics data to guide metabolic engineering and achieve higher production of target molecules from heterologous pathways. The method is based on the application of principal component analysis to a collection of proteomics and target molecule production data to pinpoint specific enzymes that need to have their expression level adjusted to maximize production. We illustrated the method on the heterologous mevalonate pathway in Escherichia coli that produces a wide range of isoprenoids and requires balanced pathway gene expression for high yields and titers. PCAP-guided engineering resulted in over a 40% improvement in the production of two valuable terpenes. PCAP could potentially be productively applied to other heterologous pathways as well.
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•We report quantitative analysis method for proteomics data using PCA.•Principal component analysis of proteomics (PCAP) can direct metabolic engineering.•PCAP provides information not apparent by the simple observation of proteomics data.•PCAP was successfully applied to improve the mevalonate pathway (MEV) in E. coli.•Limonene and bisabolene production increased about 40% using PCAP-based strategy.
j5 DNA Assembly Design Automation Software Hillson, Nathan J; Rosengarten, Rafael D; Keasling, Jay D
ACS synthetic biology,
01/2012, Letnik:
1, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Recent advances in Synthetic Biology have yielded standardized and automatable DNA assembly protocols that enable a broad range of biotechnological research and development. Unfortunately, the ...experimental design required for modern scar-less multipart DNA assembly methods is frequently laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone. Here, we report the development and deployment of a web-based software tool, j5, which automates the design of scar-less multipart DNA assembly protocols including SLIC, Gibson, CPEC, and Golden Gate. The key innovations of the j5 design process include cost optimization, leveraging DNA synthesis when cost-effective to do so, the enforcement of design specification rules, hierarchical assembly strategies to mitigate likely assembly errors, and the instruction of manual or automated construction of scar-less combinatorial DNA libraries. Using a GFP expression testbed, we demonstrate that j5 designs can be executed with the SLIC, Gibson, or CPEC assembly methods, used to build combinatorial libraries with the Golden Gate assembly method, and applied to the preparation of linear gene deletion cassettes for E. coli. The DNA assembly design algorithms reported here are generally applicable to broad classes of DNA construction methodologies and could be implemented to supplement other DNA assembly design tools. Taken together, these innovations save researchers time and effort, reduce the frequency of user design errors and off-target assembly products, decrease research costs, and enable scar-less multipart and combinatorial DNA construction at scales unfeasible without computer-aided design.
The Joint BioEnergy Institute Inventory of Composable Elements (JBEI-ICEs) is an open source registry platform for managing information about biological parts. It is capable of recording information ...about 'legacy' parts, such as plasmids, microbial host strains and Arabidopsis seeds, as well as DNA parts in various assembly standards. ICE is built on the idea of a web of registries and thus provides strong support for distributed interconnected use. The information deposited in an ICE installation instance is accessible both via a web browser and through the web application programming interfaces, which allows automated access to parts via third-party programs. JBEI-ICE includes several useful web browser-based graphical applications for sequence annotation, manipulation and analysis that are also open source. As with open source software, users are encouraged to install, use and customize JBEI-ICE and its components for their particular purposes. As a web application programming interface, ICE provides well-developed parts storage functionality for other synthetic biology software projects. A public instance is available at public-registry.jbei.org, where users can try out features, upload parts or simply use it for their projects. The ICE software suite is available via Google Code, a hosting site for community-driven open source projects.
The re-use of previously validated designs is critical to the evolution of synthetic biology from a research discipline to an engineering practice. Here we describe the Synthetic Biology Open ...Language (SBOL), a proposed data standard for exchanging designs within the synthetic biology community. SBOL represents synthetic biology designs in a community-driven, formalized format for exchange between software tools, research groups and commercial service providers. The SBOL Developers Group has implemented SBOL as an XML/RDF serialization and provides software libraries and specification documentation to help developers implement SBOL in their own software. We describe early successes, including a demonstration of the utility of SBOL for information exchange between several different software tools and repositories from both academic and industrial partners. As a community-driven standard, SBOL will be updated as synthetic biology evolves to provide specific capabilities for different aspects of the synthetic biology workflow.
Plate-based proteomic sample preparation offers a solution to the large sample throughput demands in the biotechnology field where hundreds or thousands of engineered microbes are constructed for ...testing is routine. Meanwhile, sample preparation methods that work efficiently on broader microbial groups are desirable for new applications of proteomics in other fields, such as microbial communities. Here, we detail a step-by-step protocol that consists of cell lysis in an alkaline chemical buffer (NaOH/SDS) followed by protein precipitation with high-ionic strength acetone in 96-well format. The protocol works for a broad range of microbes (e.g., Gram-negative bacteria, Gram-positive bacteria, non-filamentous fungi) and the resulting proteins are ready for tryptic digestion for bottom-up quantitative proteomic analysis without the need for desalting column cleanup. The yield of protein using this protocol increases linearly with respect to the amount of starting biomass from 0.5-2.0 OD*mL of cells. By using a bench-top automated liquid dispenser, a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly option to eliminating pipette tips and reducing reagent waste, the protocol takes approximately 30 minutes to extract protein from 96 samples. Tests on mock mixtures showed expected results that the biomass composition structure is in close agreement with the experimental design. Lastly, we applied the protocol for the composition analysis of a synthetic community of environmental isolates grown on two different media. This protocol has been developed to facilitate rapid, low-variance sample preparation of hundreds of samples and allow flexibility for future protocol development.
We report an all-in-one platform - ScanDrop - for the rapid and specific capture, detection, and identification of bacteria in drinking water. The ScanDrop platform integrates droplet microfluidics, ...a portable imaging system, and cloud-based control software and data storage. The cloud-based control software and data storage enables robotic image acquisition, remote image processing, and rapid data sharing. These features form a "cloud" network for water quality monitoring. We have demonstrated the capability of ScanDrop to perform water quality monitoring via the detection of an indicator coliform bacterium, Escherichia coli, in drinking water contaminated with feces. Magnetic beads conjugated with antibodies to E. coli antigen were used to selectively capture and isolate specific bacteria from water samples. The bead-captured bacteria were co-encapsulated in pico-liter droplets with fluorescently-labeled anti-E. coli antibodies, and imaged with an automated custom designed fluorescence microscope. The entire water quality diagnostic process required 8 hours from sample collection to online-accessible results compared with 2-4 days for other currently available standard detection methods.
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