This week, the National Science Foundation announced the award of a six-year, $22M grant to UC Santa Barbara under its biofoundries program for the establishment of the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB), a collaboration led by UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), together with UC Riverside (UCR), and Cal Poly Pomona...
University of California - Santa BarbaraAug 29 2024 This week, the National Science Foundation announced the award of a six-year, $22M grant to UC Santa Barbara under its biofoundries program for the establishment of the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi , Archaea and Bacteria , a collaboration led by UC Santa Barbara , together with UC Riverside , and Cal Poly Pomona . ExFAB establishes the nation's first biofoundry that focuses on largely untapped and unexplored extreme microbes.
ExFAB will focus on developing techniques to learn from nature's more unusual microorganisms, referred to as "extreme" in that they do not conform to standard growth habits and culture conditions in a lab. They may have unusual nutritional requirements, grow at extremely high or low temperatures, and even grow without oxygen, all of which makes them difficult to study with existing laboratory equipment.
the field has focused on microorganisms that are easy to grow, domesticate, and proliferate under standard laboratory conditions. Yet, domesticated microbes are often devoid of the traits that researchers want to exploit most for biotechnology. The most successful biological products in nature are built almost entirely by unusual microorganisms that have unique growth habits and are unwieldy.
"ExFAB provides an exciting opportunity to open synthetic biology to the vast diversity of microbes that nature provides," added ExFAB co-director Ian Wheeldon, a chemical environmental engineering professor at UCR, who is an expert in synthetic biology and engineering non-conventional microbes. "The current focus of synthetic biology has been to develop new approaches to engineering a small number of commonly used microbes.
All three participating universities are Hispanic Serving Institutions and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions . The California Institute of Science and Innovation at UCSB will manage and coordinate ExFAB operations at all three campuses and provide a home for UCSB's new NSF-funded biofoundry.
Bacteria Bioengineering Biotechnology Fungi Laboratory Ph Research Students Synthetic Biology
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