SBIR Phase I: Commercialization of Bio-Design Automation Software for Synthetic Biology

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will be to develop algorithms and software to address basic and fundamental design automation tasks in synthetic biology. The goal is to fundamentally change the way that biological designs are conceived, designed, and physically created. The tools and techniques proposed introduce a new way of thinking about biological engineering that will transform the current biological procedures from an "artisanal" craft confined to small niche research projects to an engineering discipline based on modular parts, characterization data, requirements, rule-based design, optimized planning, and standardized automation, all capable of scaling up to support the complexity of future applications, and is the first to do so in an end-to-end manner. Further, the proposed work is a core enabler for the synthetic biology discipline that has the potential to assist the biomanufacturing industry turn resources and expertise into products. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop algorithms and software for the design, planning, assembly, and analysis of synthetic biological constructs. The proposed activities will bring three software tools closer to commercial deployment: Tools for genetic design, assembly planning, and rule mining. This proposal addresses the fundamental overall problem of designing, building, and optimizing a network of genes that produce a specified behavior in an organism. The proposed project will further develop and tailor software algorithms and tools for the combinatorial design of genetic networks using graph theory. It will extend algorithms and tools for planning the DNA assembly of large sets of designs using advanced dynamic programming algorithms, and it will integrate data mining approaches for learning design rules for optimizing genetic networks.