Building national hardware and software infrastructure for UK DNA Foundries

To date, the BBSRC has invested over £50M towards establishing Synthetic Biology Research Centres (SBRCs) and building DNA synthesis facilities in the UK. This application seeks to build on this investment through establishing a collaboration between Edinburgh, Cambridge and TGAC to develop software infrastructure to improve efficiency and automation and to consolidate and further enhance the services offered at the national DNA foundries based in Edinburgh and Norwich. The software infrastructure will be developed by teams at Edinburgh, TGAC and Cambridge with well-established track records in high quality software engineering. The software will be made freely available under an open source license to all members of the SB community via software repositories. This proposal also complements EPSRC-funded SB work at Edinburgh and Cambridge as part of the nationwide Flowers Consortium thus providing a natural route to dissemination. The infrastructure proposed will significantly enhance the Edinburgh and TGAC DNA synthesis facilities, and the implementation of the software infrastructure will establish a new collaboration between three strong software teams across the UK, with the intention that these collaborations will grow with time. Both hardware and software infrastructure will enhance the speed and efficiency with which DNA can be designed, synthesized, assembled and verified, increasing the capability to generate synthetic DNA sequences. Finally, we will also implement sequence screening protocols to safeguard synthetic biotechnology.