Team:Berkeley Wetlab/Automation

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Contents

Why Automate?

Our approach to characterizing cell surface display required us to make a lot of parts.

Making Basic Parts

The first step in any synthetic bio device is to make basic parts. Making basic parts typically entails the mixing of many oligo nucleotides and PCR. Our team needed to make a lot of basic parts, so we developed a method for doing cheap in-house gene synthesis.

Making Composite Parts

The next step, after making new basic parts, is to assemble those basic parts into composite part devices. There has been a lot of work being done at UC Berkeley to automate the process of composite part assembly. We were able to implement many newly developed techniques to create a large number of composite parts.

Success!

Using our newly developed automated assembly processes we were able to make over 800 parts (both basic and composite) in one summer! This magnitude of part making is unprecedented in iGEM competitions and enabled us to test a very large number of variations on cell surface display systems.

Success Rates

The assembly scheme we developed works just as well as assembly by hand and is much faster.

BerkeleyAssemblyScheme.jpg We made a lot of parts with a robot. BerkeleyAssembly.png