The Challenge
The world’s first cloud lab grant program
The Bioautomation Challenge offers academic labs & individual contributors the opportunity to build an automated method in Emerald Cloud Lab.
Together, we aim to develop open source code that is used by the entire community.
Successful applicants receive training, cloud lab development time, and a reagent budget.
Upcoming Opportunities:
We will be launching a partner team focused on cell-culture in late Summer 23’. Apply now if you have experience with cell-culture related experiments!
PROTOCOL ROADMAP
Emerald Cloud Labs has the instrumentation required for in vitro protein characterization, and will soon have in instrumentation for in vivo experiments. What is missing is an “applications layer” that uses the instrumentation to execute essential protocols.
Align is coordinating the community to generate open-source software for these essential protocols.
Most protein engineering workflows can be executed as part of a standard, modular, three-part process: prepare the DNA, express the protein, and characterize the protein. In between each of these three essential steps are standard sample types: purified and QC’d DNA or protein. These standard sample types make the protocols modular: any of the DNA assembly technique can be mixed-and-matched with any expression technique.
The team at Align is building out the essential infrastructure over the next six months that will enable entirely in-the-cloud protein engineering. Academic research labs that are part of the Challenge are also expanding these protocols (outlined in green), and we invite the broader community to do so as well.
Open Source
Learn more about how to upload and download notebooks from Github, coding conventions, and protocols in the experimental sandbox at Cloud Lab Commons.
Frequently Asked Questions
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For individual contributors: We are currently looking for applications from individual contributors with experience with bacteria and tissue culture.
For academic labs: We are not accepting new applications from academic labs.
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Emerald Cloud Lab is a facility based in South San Francisco, California. It houses $25M+ of scientific equipment, all of which can be controlled remotely through a single, unified API. Unlike CROs and most university core facilities, data and metadata is captured about the experiments performed at Emerald at every step of the process, allowing you to understand exactly what happened remotely.
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You can find a complete list of instruments available at Emerald Cloud Lab here. In addition to the instruments that are currently available, all of the “Cell Culture” instruments will be coming online during the program, so we welcome proposals that incorporate those instruments.
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Yes there are. In fact, you can program instructions for human technicians (i.e., “gently pipette off the supernatant”) interspersed with robotic instructions if necessary.
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Emerald hosts on-boarding sessions that will introduce you to everything you need to know about programming experiments on their platform. After on-boarding, you will also have access to weekly office hours with support staff who can continue to answer questions during development.
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In order to not overwhelm our cloud lab provider with too many new users, participants in the 2022 Bioautomation challenge will be on-boarded in batches through the end of the year. After selecting proposals, we will be in contact to determine scheduling that works for your group.
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You retain all your IP rights, just as you would if the work was done on your own bench.
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You are welcome to publish projects involving automated methods as you would normally. In addition, you may opt to be included in a consortia white paper summarizing the effort at the end of the Challenge.
Still have more questions?
Reach out through Twitter or email us
at contact@alignbio.org.
Supported by
A philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
In collaboration with