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open sharing of protocols. With a precise ontology to describe standardized protocols, it may be possible to share methods widely and create community standards.
We envisage that in future individual research laboratories, or clusters of co-located laboratories, will have in-house, low-cost automation work cells but will access DNA foundries via the cloud to carry out complex experimental workflows. Technologies enabling this from companies such as Emerald Cloud Lab (S. San Francisco, CA, USA), Synthace (London) and Transcriptic (Menlo Park, CA, USA) could, for example, send experimental designs to foundries and return output data to a researcher. This mixed economy should accelerate the development and sharing of standardized protocols and metrology standards and shift a growing proportion of molecular, cellular and synthetic biology into a fully quantitative and reproducible era.
COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
David W McClymont1 & Paul S Freemont1,2
1The London DNA Foundry, UK Synthetic Biology Innovation, Commercialisation and Industrial Translation Centre, London, UK.
2Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, Department of Medicine, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, London, UK. e-mail: mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected] or mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected] .
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4. ANSI SLAS 12004: Footprint dimensions; ANSI SLAS 22004: Height dimensions; ANSI SLAS 32004: Bottom outside flange dimensions; ANSI SLAS 42004: Well positions; (ANSI SLAS, 2004).
5. Mckernan, K. & Gustafson, E. in DNA Sequencing II: Optimizing Preparation and Cleanup (ed. Kieleczawa, J.) 9.128 (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2006).6. Storch, M. et al. BASIC: a new biopart assembly standard for idempotent cloning provides accurate, single-tier DNA assembly for synthetic biology. ACS Synth. Biol. 4, 781787 (2015).
2017 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
2017 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
Toil enables reproducible, open source, big biomedical data analyses
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