IDBR: TYPE A - Microfluidic Fungal Transformation System for Ultra High-Throughput Functional Genomics

得克萨斯农工大学被授予开发一种基于微流控芯片的仪器，该仪器能够实现超快的基因转化和真菌筛选。真菌在人类生活和地球生态系统中扮演着重要的角色，无论是有益的还是有害的。快速发展的分子遗传学和基因组技术使科学家能够了解真菌的内部工作原理，并利用这些信息在以真菌为基础的生物生产和减轻真菌、人类和作物疾病方面做出重大改进。尽管功能基因组学发生了这场革命，但删除或替换真菌中的基因仍然是明确表征其功能的首选方法，这一过程仍然昂贵、耗时和劳动密集型。该项目将开发一种仪器，利用电场和声压对真菌进行高效的遗传转化，然后使用最新的微流控芯片实验室技术快速筛选成功转化的突变菌株。开发的仪器将由几个真菌生物学研究人员进行Beta测试，然后通过在会议和视频期刊上的动手演示广泛传播。这一仪器有望通过提供一种简化的基因敲除仪器，在效率和成本节约方面有数量级的改进，从而在真菌生物学和更广泛的微生物学领域对全球功能基因组学研究产生革命性的影响。该文书还将对农业和生物技术行业产生重大的长期影响。拟议的仪器开发过程需要工程师和微生物学家之间的密切合作，因此将提供宝贵的多学科研究环境，以培养科学和工程领域的下一代领导者。值得注意的是，该项目还将为我们的博士后、研究生和本科生提供针对高中和普通公众的外联活动，以交流科学研究和令人兴奋的发现。该奖项由两个项目联合颁发-(1)生物基础设施司(生物科学局)的生物研究仪器开发，(2)化学、生物工程、环境和运输系统司(工程局)的生物技术、生化和生物质工程。

An award is made to the Texas A&M University to develop an instrument based on microfluidic chips that enables ultra-fast genetic transformation and screening of fungi. Fungi play important roles, both beneficial and detrimental, in human life and in the earth's ecosystem. Rapidly improving molecular genetics and genomic technologies have allowed scientists to understand the inner workings of fungi and to utilize such information for making significant improvements in fungi-based bioproduction and mitigating fungal human and crop diseases. Despite this revolution in functional genomics, deleting or replacing genes in fungi is still the preferred method to unambiguously characterize their functions, a process that remains costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. The project is to develop an instrument that enables highly efficient genetic transformation of fungi using electric field and acoustic pressure, followed by rapid screening of the successfully transformed mutant strains using the latest microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology. The developed instrument will be beta-tested by several fungal biology researchers and subsequently broadly disseminated through hands-on demonstrations at conferences and video journals. This instrument is expected to revolutionize functional genomics research worldwide in both fungal biology and more broadly in microbiology by providing a streamlined gene-knockout instrument with orders-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency and cost savings. The instrument will also have significant long-term impacts on the agricultural and biotechnology industry. The proposed instrument development process requires close collaboration between engineers and microbiologists, and therefore will provide invaluable multidisciplinary research environment to train the next-generation of leaders in science and engineering. Notably, the project will also offer our post-docs, graduate students and undergraduates to engage in outreach activities aimed at high schools and the general public in the interest of communicating scientific research and exciting discoveries.This award is being made jointly by two Programs- (1) Instrument Development for Biological Research, in the Division of Biological Infrastructure (Biological Sciences Directorate), and (2) Biotechnology, Biochemical and Biomass Engineering, in the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (Engineering Directorate).