A new facility at the University of Edinburgh will assemble custom DNA molecules up to one million base pairs long—the size of a small bacterial chromosome—and deliver them to researchers and companies on demand. Today, building large synthetic DNA constructs is slow, labour-intensive, and error-prone. The Edinburgh Genome Foundry aims to turn this into a routine, low-cost process, much as DNA sequencing has become over the past two decades. The Foundry will design, build, and test these large gene constructs for academic and industrial users, while also serving as a test bed for automating the entire DNA synthesis workflow. If successful, the Foundry could transform synthetic biology from a craft into an industrial-scale capability. Researchers would be able to routinely assemble entire genetic circuits and metabolic pathways, allowing them to probe fundamental questions about how biology works and evolves. Industrial users could engineer microbes to produce new materials, chemicals, or medicines. The project is primarily an infrastructure and technology development effort—it does not promise immediate consumer products—but it aims to make large-scale DNA construction as cheap and accessible as sequencing is today, which would accelerate both fundamental science and applied biotechnology.
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Our vision is to establish a Genome Foundry at the University of Edinburgh that will provide end-to-end design, construction and validation of large gene constructs (up to 1Mbp) for academic and industrial applications. The Foundry will also provide a valuable test bed for novel processes and systems so we can realise a vision of full automation of the DNA synthesis process for next generation of synthetic biology. Our vision is that the design, construction and testing of up to chromosomal size synthetic constructs will become a routine part of lab life and will be available at a similar low cost to that of DNA sequencing today. However, there is much to be done to realise that goal as we need to find ways to reduce the labour-intensive and error-prone nature of the current synthetic process and better automate the workflow. The synthetic biology community needs the ability to assemble very large strands of DNA enabling the interrogation at a fundamental level of how biology works and has evolved, expression of large complex engineered genetic circuits and metabolic pathways. The Genome Foundry at Edinburgh will address these challenges: 1) It will provide a core national capability to design, build and validate large DNA constructs, generated using current state-of-the-art technologies, to support the next phase of synthetic biology. 2) It will act as a test bed for the development of new processes and systems, generated internally and externally, to facilitate the transformation of DNA synthesis to a fully automated process.
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