A greeting from ExFAB Director and Principal Investigator, Dr. Michelle A. O'Malley
Greetings from the ExFAB! Now in our second year, the NSF Biofoundry for Extreme & Exceptional Fungi, Archaea, and Bacteria (ExFAB) is thrilled to be working alongside the scientific community to translate discoveries from nature’s weird and wonderful microorganisms. Our facilities at UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Riverside, and CalPoly-Pomona are now fully installed and fully staffed - enabling us to break down barriers that limit our understanding of these difficult-to-grow microbes. The ExFABers celebrated this important milestone with the ExFAB Launch Event at UCSB on September 17th, which gathered together educational and industry partners, elected officials, and NSF leadership who enjoyed tours of the new facilities and valuable networking to plot new paths forward for ExFAB’s outreach.
This summer we also opened ExFAB’s doors to the user community. We hosted the first annual ExFAB Summer School. This one week training course focused on mastering state-of-the-art techniques in biological automation for microbes, conducted by ExFAB Scientific and Facility Leadership. Moreover, we also recruited our first cohort of summer ExFAB CSU Master Scholars that joined labs at UC-Santa Barbara and UC-Riverside to collaborate on emerging technologies and workflows that will become available to the user community. In this spirit, we are thrilled to announce ExFAB’s first call for External User Proposals (more details below) to access our unique facilities free of charge - send us your proposals by November 1st! Keep a lookout for new development and opportunities to partner with us - we look forward to collaborating with you!
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