Researchers are further developing solutions for high throughput cloning of DNA through synthetic biology. The project expands on data management, design constraint specification, DNA assembly design, and experimental protocol planning. These techniques each present algorithmic challenges as well as empirical laboratory challenges. The replacement of many manual processes with automated, high throughput techniques requires an interdisciplinary design team, a highly coordinated computational/experimental effort, and a rapid design-build-test cycle to validate the approach. This work may answer questions related to the predictive engineering of compositional DNA designs with minimal manual human intervention.
The results of this effort may impact the way that synthetic biology designs are conceived, designed, and physically created. The team's techniques will contribute to the rapid creation of new genetic material as well as broadly applicable design strategies that can be made available to the entire biological community. This work has the potential to seed an emerging bio-design automation (BDA) effort that may touch many areas of molecular biology and engage a wide variety of applications (energy, materials, drug discovery). Early work in BDA may also create valuable DNA assembly and data exchange standards which will help to unify the entire field.
