New from Autodesk:  A High Powered, Cloud Based, Open Source CAD Tool to Drive Biological Design

The Bio/Nano Research Group at Autodesk, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, is releasing an extensible, open source, cloud CAD tool to drive biological design and complex DNA construction.  Living systems are robust biological machines that can be reprogrammed to produce valuable products such as fuels, chemicals, and therapeutics.  The current software toolbox for genetic design offers solutions that are either relatively good but too expensive for scientists unless they are at large companies, or low cost but relatively low powered and quite limited.  A different approach, requiring high fidelity at low cost is necessary as more scientists want to design and build higher numbers of increasingly complex constructs.  On the manufacturing side, high throughput, long DNA fabrication technologies exist but are locked behind industry doors. For example, an industrial DNA fabrication unit can produce 2,000 constructs at 20,000 BP/construct with a turn around time of 3-4 weeks.  This leads to a situation where academic researchers and small biotech start-ups are at a disadvantage as they do not have the CAD software driving CAM based foundries required to rapidly engineer their biology. In order to empower scientists to program organisms with higher efficiency and increasing complexity, our application works at higher levels of abstraction than current software packages and will integrate with DNA Foundries seamlessly to produce those designs. Unlike other high power tools in this space, our software will be open source and freely available to the community.  It is also cloud based, fully extensible, and built with a plug-in architecture to allow for customization and increasing levels of complexity. In this presentation, we will unveil the tool to the synthetic biology community, showcase some of its capabilities, discuss future directions, and illustrate how to interact with the tool from a biology and a software development perspective.