cluster
Foundries & design
Synthetic-biology foundries, design tools and cell-free platforms.
Where it's used
Cell-free systems & cell-free bioproduction
Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) bypasses the living cell: ribosomes and translation factors in a reaction tube deliver the target protein in hours, not weeks, with toxic and non-canonical amino acids incorporated.
DNA nanotechnology & DNA origami
Folding single-stranded DNA into precision-programmed 3D nanostructures — drug-delivery nanorobots, vaccine scaffolds and metrology nanorulers.
DNA synthesis & gene foundry
The commercial gene-synthesis service and biofoundry layer of synthetic biology — turning digital DNA designs into delivered genes, clones and strain builds through phosphoramidite and emerging enzymatic synthesis, governed by pathogen-sequence biosecurity screening.
Generative protein design
Creating completely novel, non-natural protein structures and sequences from scratch using diffusion networks and large language models for therapeutics and biosensors.
iGEM infrastructure, BioBricks and standard genetic parts
The shared substrate synthetic biology runs on — a registry of standard parts and the student competition that populates it, nonprofit plasmid repositories, commercial gene synthesis reaching 7,000 base pairs on complex sequences, and automated biofoundries whose assemblies are now validated by long-read sequencing.
Metabolic engineering
Rational design and optimization of microbial metabolic pathways to produce high-value chemicals, advanced materials, and alternative proteins at industrial scale.