A High Throughput Miniaturised Mass Spectrometry Tool for Profiling Synthetic Design Libraries

合成生物学通过应用工程原理(设计-构建-测试)来推进基因操作，通过使用定制DNA修改安全微生物来实现新的发现。写入DNA的能力已经加快，但合成生物学现在受到缺乏高通量测量方法的限制，无法评估定制菌株的表现。拟议的项目将伦敦帝国理工学院的基础合成生物学专业知识与球形流体有限公司的微流体学和质谱学(MS)专业知识结合起来。这个协同团队将构建、测试和展示一种新的微流体-MS平台，该平台能够深入分析每天数十万种工程微生物的性能(传统技术使用高采样量，每天只能测试约10,000个样本)。到目前为止，大多数合成生物学家一次只能分析一个基因。独一无二的是，我们的MS方法将能够分析人工途径的多个基因和组件。这将加速发现，并改进新的、有价值的药物和燃料来源的生产，并产生有价值的新工具和服务，用于商业化。

Synthetic biology has advanced genetic manipulation by applying engineering principles (Design-Build-Test) to enable new discoveries by modifying safe microbes with custom DNA. The ability to write DNA has accelerated, but synthetic biology is now limited by a lack of high-throughput measurement methods to assess performance of custom-built strains. The proposed project links foundational synthetic biology expertise at Imperial College London with microfluidics and mass spectrometry (MS) expertise at Sphere Fluidics Limited. This synergistic team will build, test and demonstrate a new microfluidics-MS platform that enables in-depth analysis of the performance of hundreds of thousands of engineered microbes per day (conventional techniques use high sample volumes and can only test around 10,000 samples a day). To date, most synthetic biologists have only been able to analyse one gene at a time. Uniquely, our MS approach will enable analysis of multiple genes and components of artificial pathways. This will accelerate the discovery, and improve production of new, valuable medicines and fuel sources, and generate valuable, nascent Tools and Services for commercialisation.