The Programmable Laboratory

The design-build-test cycle in synthetic biology requires build and test pipelines that are highly reproducible, maximally informative, and scalable. Traditional laboratory practices where a a small team of researchers designs and performs their own experiments in a unstructured lab, in contrast, are difficult to reproduce and scale. In this talk, I will describe several recent efforts to standardize how protocols and workflows are specified using formal, executable programming languages. I will argue that treating experimental workflows as code is leading to a revolution in how experimental work is done and offers huge advantages, such as easy integration into upstream design software and easy collaboration. I will focus in particular on my lab’s experience with Aquarium, our human-in-the-loop laboratory operating system, that can be used to run experimental workflow programs reliably and reproducibly. I will also describe several projects in yeast synthetic biology that Aquarium has enabled.