This week, the National Science Foundation announced the award of a six-year, $22 million grant to UC Santa Barbara under its biofoundries program to establish the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB), a collaboration led by UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), along with UC Riverside (UCR) and Cal Poly Pomona (CPP). ExFAB is creating the nation’s first biofoundry focusing on largely untapped and unexplored extreme microbes. UCSB’s award is one of only five grants made under NSF’s BioFoundry program during this funding cycle, which awarded a total of $75 million to the five selected universities.
“Our campus is thrilled to receive this visionary funding from the National Science Foundation, which reflects the research strength and innovation of our colleagues working across disciplines and institutions to advance biotechnology and bioengineering,” said the chancellor of UCSB Henry T. Yang.
We congratulate Professor O’Malley and our entire campus team and thank Michelle for her leadership in this groundbreaking effort. Our campus is known for our culture of working collaboratively at the cutting edge, and we very much look forward to the discoveries that will be made through the BioFoundry as our colleagues explore new frontiers in the world of extreme microbes.”
Henry T. Yang, Chancellor, University of California – Santa Barbara
“We are extremely excited because this funding enables us to create infrastructure that no one, especially in academia, has had access to before,” said ExFAB director Michelle O’Malley, a professor of chemical and industrial engineering at UCSB. “The facility allows us to unlock the promise of a new generation of synthetic biology—one that focuses on developing new biotechnology from extreme and unusual microorganisms found in nature.”
ExFAB will focus on developing techniques to learn from nature’s most unusual microorganisms, referred to as “extremes” because they do not conform to typical growth habits and culture conditions in a laboratory. They can have unusual nutritional requirements, grow at extremely high or low temperatures, and even grow without oxygen, making them difficult to study with existing laboratory equipment.
“These extreme microbes defy our current understanding of biology, yet they often harbor traits we want to harness for biotechnology – like enzymes that chew up waste or pathways that produce valuable products and new drugs. Now, with ExFAB, users have a place to bring their ‘weird’ microbes to study and prototype new biotech from what they learn,” said O’Malley, who is a leading anaerobic engineering expert for the conversion of waste into more sustainable fuels, chemicals or biological materials.
While countless advances have been made in synthetic biology, which involves engineering “parts” of nature, such as DNA, proteins, and even entire organisms, to have new functions,
The field has focused on microorganisms that are easy to grow, domesticate, and propagate under standard laboratory conditions. However, domesticated microbes often lack the traits researchers most want to exploit for biotechnology. The most successful biological products in nature are made almost entirely by unusual microorganisms that have unique growth habits and are unwieldy. To unlock the power of extreme microbes, ExFAB will leverage synthetic biology to design first-of-its-kind instruments, new robotic workflows, and technology powered by machine learning.
ExFAB will focus its efforts on three research themes – bioremediation, biosynthesis and rules of life -; to engineer microbes that can tackle environmental challenges such as cleaning up PFAS (per and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and other “forever chemicals”, sustainable production of silicon-based materials, recycling and reusing carbon materials, and advancing production cycles carbon and nitrogen in soil and marine habitats.
“UCSB is a world leader in advancing multidisciplinary science at the central level,” said Umesh Mishra, dean of the UCSB College of Engineering. “We are extremely proud to host ExFAB because it brings together many strengths across our campus for the first time – from marine science to chemical engineering and bioengineering. This important award from NSF raises the profile of our campus and serves as a focal point for continued investment in biotechnology and bioengineering at UCSB.”
“ExFAB provides an exciting opportunity to open up synthetic biology to the vast diversity of microbes that nature provides,” added ExFAB co-director Ian Wheeldon, a professor of environmental chemical engineering at UCR who specializes in synthetic biology and the engineering of unconventional microbes. . “The current focus of synthetic biology has been to develop new approaches to engineer a small number of commonly used microbes. This facility will dramatically expand that approach by enabling synthetic biology in any microbe.”
Educating a Diverse Workforce
In addition to promoting new scientific discoveries, ExFAB will create unique educational programs to educate and attract the future biotechnology workforce. ExFAB will recruit California State University (CSU) graduate students to participate in a ten-week research internship at UCSB or UCR, during which they will receive professional development training and work in a scientific community at an R1 university (intensive research). ExFAB will also offer a summer school to train and recruit new users.
“Many CSU students want to enter industry or PhD programs but have no experience at an R1 university,” said Jamie Snyder, associate professor of biological sciences at CPP. “This opportunity will allow them to train on automated equipment they will likely find in industry and interact with PhD students, postdocs, lab technicians and senior scientists in the R1 labs. ExFAB will allow us to create even more pathways for students, who may not feel represented in the field, move into the biotech workforce.”
All three participating universities are Hispanic Serving Institutes (HSI) and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander (AANAPISI).
The base
UCSB laid the groundwork for ExFAB months before applying to NSF’s BioFoundries Program when O’Malley, through UCSB’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnology (ICB) received a $9.85 million grant through the Defense University Research Ordnance Program (DURIP). The funding allowed the university to purchase a robotic assembly workflow and analytical tools to enable automated synthetic biology.
“The exciting new investment from NSF recognizes UCSB’s growing research prominence in the field of synthetic biology and builds on the recent investment from the Army Research Office,” said chemical engineering professor Brad Chmelka, ICB co-director. “This NSF award exponentially expands UCSB’s interdisciplinary research culture in biology, materials science, physics, chemistry, and engineering, which will benefit and is expected to catalyze new innovations and applications in biotechnology.”
The California Science and Innovation Institute (CNSI) at UCSB will manage and coordinate ExFAB operations across all three campuses and provide a home for UCSB’s new NSF-funded biofoundry.
“CNSI is proud to be the home of ExFAB and provide foundational support that will increase the impact of ExFAB innovations,” said CNSI co-director Craig Hawker, professor of materials and chemistry and biochemistry. “The unique suite of state-of-the-art instruments that cannot be found elsewhere will enable translation into technologies that will directly address some of the country’s greatest challenges, with a workforce that is ready and able to use these innovations.”
External users from industry and academia can access the ExFAB BioFoundry in two ways: directly sending samples for full staff handling or on-site training and sharing equipment with staff. Leadership aims to complete at least 100 total user projects in the first six years, estimating that more than half will be external projects.
“As a Gaucho and my alma mater’s proud representative in Congress, I am truly excited to see the National Science Foundation recognize UCSB’s cutting-edge ability to lead this first-of-its-kind BioFoundry with other California universities,” he noted. Congressman Salud Carbajal. “This investment will not only keep UCSB at the forefront of life science and bioengineering, but will create new high-paying high-tech jobs on the Central Coast and confirm that California is the number one place for research in the entire world.”
