Bay Area Bioinformatics Forum

Biological design and build automation platforms at JBEI and TeselaGen

  • March 2 · 4:00 PM

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Abstract:

The capacity to iterate through the biological design-build-test engineering cycle more quickly than the competition is mission critical for academics and biotechnology companies to be the first to publish or bring product to market. At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (jbei.org), we are developing several cloud-based software tools that accelerate the biological design-build-test cycle, including a biological parts repository (ICE, public-registry.jbei.org), DNA assembly design automation tools (DeviceEditor and j5, j5.jbei.org),
and a biology-friendly robot programming language (PR-PR, prpr.jbei.org). At TeselaGen (teselagen.com), we are further developing these tools into a secure commercial-grade biological design automation platform that serves the needs of our industrial clients and partners. Collectively, these technologies reduce the time, effort and cost of large scale cloning and DNA assembly tasks, as well as enable research scales otherwise unfeasible without the assistance of computer-aided design tools and robotics.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Nathan J. Hillson
1999 - B.A. Rice University, Physics/Computational and Applied Mathematics
2004 - Ph.D. Harvard Medical School, BioPhysics
2009 – Postdoc. Stanford University School of Medicine, Developmental Biology

Present -
Director of Synthetic Biology, Fuels Synthesis Division, Joint
BioEnergy Institute
Program Lead, Genomic Engineering, Joint Genome Institute
Staff Scientist, Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, TeselaGen Biotechnology, Inc.

In 2011, along with two other Stanford colleagues, Nathan Hillson co-founded TeselaGen Biotechnology, Inc. and serves as its Chief Science Officer. Nathan also works at Berkeley Lab developing foundational technologies that accelerate the biological design-build-test engineering cycle. At Berkeley Lab, Nathan developed j5, a software tool that supports DNA design and cost optimized assembly instruction generation using advanced synthetic biology techniques. TeselaGen was awarded the commercialization and distribution rights to j5 which serves as one of the foundational technologies in TeselaGen's Biological Design Automation platform. Nathan pursued his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard Medical School investigating how microbes synthesize antibiotics and other natural products and was a postdoc at Stanford developing a whole-cell uranium biosensor and researching bacterial cell-cycle regulation.

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  • Stephen Gross
    Stephen Gross

    Good talk. I'll probably start integrating the JBEI-ICE repository into my work, will see if I can play around with J5.

    March 4

  • Doug Hershberger
    Doug Hershberger

    This was a great talk by Dr. Hillson, definitely in the spirit of sharing inside information with members of the Bay Area Bioinformatics community. The frequent questions and knowledgeable answers made for an interesting and informative conversation.

    Thank you to Nathan and all who participated!

    1 · March 4

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