Thread by @Eyesgack

Hi everyone! Today I want to tell you about @Friendzymes, a project and team I’ve been working on to democratize the means of biotechnological production, which you can (tax-deductibly!) support right here. (1/x) gofundme.com/f/help-igem-fr…

@Friendzymes Starting with why: a massive worldwide mobilization (political, economic, social and technological) is required to transition humanity off fossil energy and materials, build a sustainable civilization and avert a mass extinction. (2/x)

I think we’ll need advanced biological technologies, everywhere on Earth and at every scale, to support our needs for food, medicine, materials, biodiversity and ecosystem services while decarbonizing and building climate resilience. (3/x)

But the pandemic has highlighted our inadequate biotechnological productive capacity, particularly in the global South, where lack of access to capital & biomanufacturing infrastructure has severely limited tests & vaccine doses. (4/x)

As with COVID, so for climate: we don’t have anywhere near enough bioengineers or biotechnological productive capacity to build out a just, sustainable and resilient human civilization at the speed and scale required by the crisis. (5/x)

Particularly for synthetic biology, the high cost of hardware & wetware, combined with intellectual property thickets and skill barriers, have prevented the field from growing at the rate it needs to. (6/x)

However, recent developments suggest that barriers to democratizing and distributing advanced biological technologies, to accelerating the distribution and buildout of biotechnological productive capacity, are ready to fall. (7/x)

The creation of the @biobricks Foundation’s Free Genes Project means that anyone can now receive (and design, and contribute!) biosecurity-screened, off-patent and IP-free DNA parts, for free. (8/x) stanford.freegenes.org

With the Open Material Transfer Agreement, a wetware analog of open-source software licenses, we can build an unambiguous biotechnological commons of genes & cells, with full rights to modification, re-sharing and commercialization. (9/x)

Cheap @nanopore DNA sequencers & open source robotic liquid handlers, plate readers & bioreactors mean that high-capacity biofoundries for the assembly, testing and small-scale production of biological devices could be built for ~$20k USD. (10/x)

Integrated together, these pieces of hardware, software, wetware and law-ware could constitute a new and largely open-source biotechnological infrastructure stack that greatly lowers the financial and technical barriers to bioengineering. (11/x)

Lowering these barriers could rapidly expand the number of bioengineers and nodes of biotechnological research and manufacturing around the world, accelerating the transition to a sustainable human civilization. That’s my hope. (12/x)

Which brings me to @Friendzymes! Last fall in @PrakashLab’s global Frugal Science class, I met a group of incredible students from all over the world, who shared a dream of democratizing the means of biotechnological production. (13/x) gofundme.com/f/help-igem-fr…

We named ourselves Friendzymes, and set about trying to figure out how to make it as cheap and easy as possible to build genetic devices, engineer cells, and manufacture and purify recombinant proteins at high throughput. (14/x)

We planned to leverage FreeGenes to design open source, IP-free wetware libraries that enable rapid & modular construction of sophisticated genetic devices to tag, express, & secrete enzymes using B. subtilis and P. pastoris. (15/x)

We teamed up with Poly, a project to build well-documented, open source biodesign tools in Go. Several Poly developers are now Friendzymes team members, including @IsaacGuerreiro and @koeng101. (16/x) github.com/TimothyStiles/…

We identified hardware needed to build frugal biofoundries for low-cost, high-throughput bioengineering design-build-test cycles, including the @opentrons OT-2, @nanopore DNA sequencer, & open-source microplate readers & bioreactors. (17/x)

After the class ended, we kept working on and recruiting for the project. We now have team members from nine countries on five continents (and we'd love to have more!) (18/x)

We’ve teamed up with 4 wet labs (so far): BioBlaze in Chicago (led by @SarahBWare); @hivebiolab in Kumasi (led by @harryakligoh); @OSNVancouver in Vancouver (led by @osn_scott); and @pgcmindanao in Mindanao (led by Lyre Murao). (19/x)

With fiscal sponsorship from the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH Inc), we gained a bank account and 501(c)3 nonprofit status (making donations from US citizens to support Friendzymes tax-deductible). (20/x)

We decided the best way to organize, share & recruit for Friendzymes was to form an @iGEM team. Donations from @scotbryson, @lee_redden, @andrewhessel and @BeneficialBio enabled us to register for iGEM 2021! (21/x)

We’ve since won an @iGEM impact grant & been able to get ~15000 bases of free synthetic DNA from @idt. The rest of our wetware will be free too, since we’re submitting our designs to the Free Genes Project. (22/x)

Most recently, @opentrons has generously sponsored Friendzymes: all four of our wet labs will have fully stocked OT-2 liquid handling robots with 2 multichannel pipettes, magdeck & tempdeck modules, and pipette tips! (23/x)

We plan for these OT-2 robots to form the nuclei of a global network of frugal, open-source biofoundries--nodes in the bionet, as @DrewEndy might say. (24/x)

Which brings me to our current fundraising push: between FreeGenes, Poly, and @opentrons’s donation, we’ve covered the design and build sides of low-cost, high-throughput bioengineering design-build-test cycles. But what about test? (25/x)

To test that we’ve actually built the genetic devices we designed, Friendzymes’ frugal biofoundries will need DNA sequencers. Specifically, @nanopore’s $1000 MinION sequencers, along with packs of $99 Flongle flow cells & prep kits. (26/x)

To rapidly test the performance of many biological devices (in our case, by measuring expression & secretion of fluorescently tagged recombinant proteins), we’ll need the ~$3500 components to build open source microplate readers. (27/x) github.com/brianchowlab/O…

And to scale up production of proteins to 5 liter batches, we’re going to build bioreactors based on @ATinyGreenCell’s delightful open source BioBlade design, which costs ~$200 in components & provides temperature control & aeration. (28/x)

Combining the nanopore sequencer & consumables, the plate reader, the bioreactor, & the accompanying plasticware & lab reagents, we need ~$10,700 to build out one fully functioning frugal biofoundry, or ~$43,000 to build four. (29/x)

That’s why we’re asking for your help: to build frugal biofoundries, make cheap enzymes, democratize the means of biotechnological production, & accelerate biology’s contribution to building a good future. (30/x) gofundme.com/f/help-igem-fr…

Any donation helps, but obviously more money means more frugal biofoundries around the world! And as I mentioned, GOSH’s sponsorship of Friendzymes means donations from US citizens will be tax-deductible. (31/x)

Other ways you can help:
(1) Share this thread & the fundraising page, especially if you donated! Social proof works.
(2) Reach out & connect us with potential donors (e.g. synbio enthusiasts whose assets just got a lot more liquid! 👀 @Ginkgo) (32/x)

(3) In October, Friendzymes is partnering with @jogl on a global hackathon to develop executable plans for frugal biofoundries in as many places as possible. Come to it! (33/x) eventbrite.com/e/hackathon-fr…

(4) Join Friendzymes yourself, and help us democratize biotechnology! We’re particularly excited for more software, wetware & hardware engineers; but anyone, anywhere with a drive to learn by doing is welcome. Feel free to reach out! (34/x)

A better world is possible. Let’s make it easier to help build it with biology. Thanks for reading! (fin) 🧬🌱🌅
gofundme.com/f/help-igem-fr…