The MagEx STAR liquid handler in GIFS’ Engineering Biology Platform was customized to support the unique work and services GIFS supports, including DNA extraction and transformation.
The Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan is thinking big — like, really big.
A team at GIFS is currently building the organization’s new Engineering Biology Platform where biology, lab automation, and machine learning will be combined to enable research at a scale well beyond traditional experiments.
“I want to challenge people to think of engineering biology where scale is no longer an issue. Get used to thinking at scales of thousands, millions, and billions of evolving systems,” said Dr. Benjamin Scott (PhD), Engineering Biology Platform Lead at GIFS. “We want to enable researchers to ask questions that you wouldn’t normally be able to answer. That’s the crux of it.”
Engineering Biology at GIFS
Engineering biology is a burgeoning field of research and development that’s driving innovation across multiple sectors, including in agriculture and agri-food, where it’s projected to have a trillion-dollar economic impact.
For those new to the field, Scott provides a straightforward definition: using biology to build useful products.
Once fully operational, GIFS’ laboratory will support a suite of strain engineering, cell growth and phenotyping, and metabolomics and proteomics services to scientists, research organizations, and companies across both the public and private sectors.
These activities will support the development of plants, microbes, enzymes, and small molecules with highly specific traits. They’re all key pieces that can contribute to climate-resilient crops, alternative protein sources, novel ingredients, and enhanced crop inputs, among other applications.
Using automated methods at GIFS’ Engineering Biology Platform, bacteria have been “transformed” with DNA encoding a green fluorescent protein, saving significant time and resources. Instead of 96 individual petri dishes, all transformations were precisely plated on a single dish using an automated liquid handler.
Automation Scales Research Activities
In the next year, GIFS’ Engineering Biology laboratory will receive a significant expansion with the installation of several new instruments.
These investments are supported by more than $9 million in funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Prairies Economic Development Canada, and Innovation Saskatchewan.
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Several important pieces of equipment are, however, already online, including a MagEx STAR liquid handler capable of performing hundreds of DNA extractions at a time. That instrument has also been modified to enable DNA transformation, the process in which specific DNA sequences are inserted into microbes — an activity it can complete far faster and more precisely than manual methods.
An automated colony picker is a unique piece of equipment in GIFS’ Engineering Biology Platform. Capable of fluorescence-, colour-, and halo-based picking, it can automatically pick up to 2,400 microbial colonies every hour, selecting those with desired traits from large, complex mixtures — significantly enhancing the speed at which researchers can work.
A RapidPick MP automated colony picker is also in operation. That instrument can identify microbes with specific traits and transfer them to new growth media.
Colony picking is typically a laborious, time-intensive procedure with significant variability and risk of human error. By harnessing automation, up to 2,400 colonies can be picked each hour, helping to rapidly identify microbes with desired traits from complex mixtures. This is far faster than what an individual scientist can complete, supporting larger, high-quality data sets that help researchers get to desired results with less time and manual labour.
Following the renovations, cutting-edge precision fermentation equipment — from the mL to 10 L scale — and the latest HPLC and mass spectrometers will be installed to enable high-throughput strain engineering, proteomics, and metabolomics.
“We can get startups and academics to think at a scale that industry is used to planning in,” said Scott.
Examining Enzymes and Fertilizer Efficiency
These and other instruments are already assisting a project led by Scott that was recently awarded a $122,000 USD Homeworld Collective Garden Grant.
Phosphorous is one of the most important nutrients for crop production. The Homeworld Collective-funded project aims to enhance fertilizer efficiency through the design of new-to-nature enzymes that can release phosphorus already present in soil and manure.
Just last fall, GIFS’ Omics and Precision Analytics Laboratory became the first laboratory in Western Canada to provide sequencing services for Revio, the latest DNA sequencing system from PacBio. The addition of that instrument significantly expanded GIFS’ sequencing capacity and added to its complete suite of long- and short-read technologies.
Collaboration to Advance Discovery
In this, and other projects, the large, high-quality datasets collected by GIFS’ team will enable computer models to learn and make predictions that inform the design, build, test and learn cycle that researchers iterate through to develop products or systems.
These important steps are assisted by GIFS’ genomics and data analytics platforms, both of which have a proven track-record of delivering high-quality data through the leading-edge technologies and services they are already providing to researchers around the world.
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“Engineering biology, also known as synthetic biology, is a maturing field, so it’s not sci-fi, but the scale that we can achieve is incredible. Having all of this equipment under one roof is something that is really special,” said Dr. Megha Bajaj (PhD), GIFS’ Engineering Biology Business Lead.
The Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan provides researchers with a wide range of services and solutions to scale and accelerate their research. Learn more at gifs.ca/partners or in our Services & Solutions guide (PDF). Questions? Contact partnerwithus@gifs.ca.