A Versatile Microfluidic Device for Automating Synthetic Biology

New microbes are being engineered that contain the genetic circuitry, metabolic pathways, and other cellular functions required for a wide range of applications such as producing biofuels, biobased chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Although currently available tools are useful in improving the synthetic biologyprocess, further improvements in physical automation would help to lower the barrierof entryinto this field. We present an innovative microfluidicplatform for assembling DNA fragmentswith 10× lower volumes (compared to that of current microfluidicplatforms) and with integrated region-specifictemperature control and on-chip transformation. Integration of these steps minimizes the loss of reagents and products compared to that with conventional methods, which require multiple pipetting steps. For assembling DNA fragments, we implemented three commonly used DNA assemblyprotocols on our microfluidicdevice: Golden Gate assembly, Gibson assembly, and yeast assembly(i.e., TAR cloning, DNA Assembler...