Countless advances have occurred in synthetic biology, which has focused on microorganisms that are easy to grow, domesticate, and proliferate under standard laboratory conditions. Yet, domesticated microbes are often devoid of the very traits that we want to harness most for biotechnology. For biotechnology to advance, we need to unlock the previously un-accessed genetic diversity of nature’s microbes.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Biofoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea, and Bacteria (ExFAB) offers an end-to-end pipeline that generates microbial libraries to be genotyped, phenotyped and engineered, operating a first-of-its-kind facility open to industry and academia from across the nation.
Through novel, state-of-the-art infrastructure and workflows, the NSF ExFAB BioFoundry focuses on extreme and exceptional microbes. Extreme, in that they do not conform to standard growth habits and culture conditions, and “exceptional” in that they defy our current understanding of biology yet possess traits that biotechnology should harness.
The NSF ExFAB BioFoundry has a keen interest in unlocking the innate power of anaerobic, uncultivatable and filamentous microbes, as well as microbial communities, and seeks a deeper understanding of non-canonical morphology and atypical metabolisms.
Some of the scientific grand challenges embraced by our in-house research program to unlock the promise of extreme and exceptional microbes include:
