The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a $1.4 million grant to scientists at Stanford and UC Berkeley to fund Biofab, a biofabrication laboratory that aims to manufacture standardized DNA parts.

The NSF grant is supplemented by matching funds from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the BioBricks Foundation.

Drew Endy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, will head the project with BioFab co-director Adam Arkin, a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Endy also serves as the president of the BioBricks Foundation.

Endy said Biofab will be dedicated to making synthetic DNA parts more accessible. Standardized DNA pieces present numerous opportunities to the biotechnology industry and academia, but are both expensive and time-intensive. The manufacture of a single synthetic DNA part can cost millions of dollars and requires years of work.

The Biofab researchers hope to make these DNA parts readily available to scientists in the near future.

— An Le Nguyen