Building national hardware and software infrastructure for UK DNA Foundries

到目前为止，BBSRC已投资超过5000万GB在英国建立合成生物学研究中心(SBRC)和建设DNA合成设施。这项申请寻求通过在爱丁堡、剑桥和TGAC之间建立合作来开发软件基础设施，以提高效率和自动化，并巩固和进一步增强爱丁堡和诺里奇的国家DNA代工厂提供的服务，从而在这一投资的基础上再接再厉。软件基础设施将由爱丁堡、TGAC和剑桥的团队开发，这些团队在高质量软件工程方面有着良好的记录。该软件将在开放源码许可下通过软件存储库免费提供给SB社区的所有成员。这项建议也是对EPSRC资助的爱丁堡和剑桥的SB工作的补充，作为全国性花卉联盟的一部分，从而提供了一条自然的传播途径。拟议的基础设施将显著增强爱丁堡和TGAC的DNA合成设施，软件基础设施的实施将在英国三个强大的软件团队之间建立新的合作，目的是这些合作将随着时间的推移而增长。硬件和软件基础设施都将提高DNA设计、合成、组装和验证的速度和效率，从而提高生成合成DNA序列的能力。最后，我们还将实施序列筛选协议，以保障合成生物技术的安全。

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.