A semi-autonomous robot synthetic biologist for industrial biodesign and manufacturing

在过去的十年中，合成生物学以及机器人和人工智能（AI）领域取得了重大进展。合成生物学是一个新兴的多学科领域，有可能在从医学到工业生物技术的许多领域产生逐步变化的好处。这一进步取决于以比以前更可预测和更明确的方式合理地设计生物有机体的能力。生物制造是未来可持续制造的重要平台。许多天然产品具有潜在的营养或药物应用价值，但不能化学合成或从自然界中收获而不显著破坏生态。通过设计进行的生物工程旨在构建新的生物实体，这些生物实体针对特定功能进行了优化，例如“细胞工厂”内的生物生产。合成生物学提供了一种在微生物生产宿主中使用可持续方法优化复杂天然产物生产的方法，就像在酵母中生产乙醇一样。先进的合成生物学工具将使我们能够处理更复杂的目标。在这里，通过将合成生物学工具与机器人技术和人工智能相结合，我们的目标是在降低新生物衍生产品的成本和开发时间方面取得重大进展。现在很明显，机器人技术对于合成生物学发挥其潜力至关重要，并且与工业生物技术特别相关。与此同时，大数据在许多技术领域以及生物领域变得越来越重要。这将导致人工智能在日常生活中的新的和强大的应用。在这里，我们寻求解决人工智能在合成生物学中的应用，使用人工智能方法来指导自动化合成生物学实验。这些进步将有可能创造新的产品，公司甚至行业，最终将有利于英国公众的经济，健康，生活质量和安全。这也将对政策和社会产生深远的影响。

The last decade has seen significant advances in the fields of synthetic biology as well as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Synthetic biology is an emerging multidisciplinary field with potential to have step-change benefits in many fields from medicine through to industrial biotechnology. This advance is dependent on the ability to rationally engineer biological organisms in a more predictable and defined way than has previously been possible. Bio-manufacturing is an increasingly important platform for a sustainable manufacturing future. Many natural products have potentially valuable nutraceutical or pharmaceutical applications, but cannot be chemically synthesised or harvested from nature without significant ecological disruption. The engineering of biology by design seeks to construct new biological entities that are optimised for specific functionality such as bio-production within a 'cellular factory'. Synthetic biology provides a method for optimising production of complex natural products using sustainable methods in a microbial production host, much like ethanol is produced in yeast. Advanced synthetic biology tools will enable us to tackle more complex targets. Here, by integrating synthetic biology tools with robotics and AI we aim to make a significant advance to reducing the cost and development time of new biologically derived products.It is now evident that robotics is essential for synthetic biology to fulfil its potential and is of particular relevance to industrial biotechnology. In parallel, big data has become increasingly important in many areas of technology as well as the biological domain. This is leading to new and powerful applications of AI in everyday life. Here we seek to address the application of AI to synthetic biology, using AI approaches to direct automated synthetic biology experiments. These advances will have the potential to create new products, companies and even industries that will ultimately benefit the economy, health, quality of life and security of the UK general public and beyond. It will also have far-reaching effects on policy and society.