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EVOPROG

EVOPROG

EVOPROG consortium

Last news: Brödel, A.K., Jaramillo, A. & Isalan M. Directed evolution of orthogonal dual transcription factors for synthetic logic gates. Accepted in Nature Communications, Oct 18 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13858

EVOPROG is an FP7 Fet Proactive project "General-Purpose Programmable Evolution Machine on a Chip" under contract number 610730. We aim at constructing a general-purpose programmable evolution machine able to quickly evolve new biomolecules or phenotypes in bacterial cells. Our device uses existing phage technology and synthetic regulation to implement a programmable directed evolution machine able to produce biomolecules or biocomputational functionality two orders of magnitude faster than conventional techniques, while consuming fewer consumables.

This project was designed by Prof. Alfonso Jaramillo in 2012, but it was not funded. Then he gathered an outstanding consortium of researchers and it was funded by EU under the FET Proactive program.

We held the final conference on Sep 15-16, 2016 at Stratford-upon-Avon at Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Programmable Evolution

We aim at programming phage and bacteria to "compute" combinatorial optimisation algorithms. Using genetic circuits we combine several different selective pressures to obtain phenotypes of interest.

An engine for in vivo-Directed Evolution

We create custom labware to face the challenges of directed evolution in continuous mode. By implementing complex flow control we are able to explore evolutionary potential of bacteria and phages alike.

Participants

University of Warwick - Alfonso Jaramillo (coordinator)

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - Alfonso Rodríguez-Patón

Imperial College London - Mark Isalan

Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)- Víctor de Lorenzo

University of Glasgow - Lee Cronin

Université d'Evry val d'Essonne (Institute of Systems and Synthetic Biology) - Vijai Singh

Objectives

Produce an advanced prototype for programmable evolution using low-cost, highly scalable components.

Develop atomic evolutionary operations and combine them into complex directed evolution protocols.

Demonstrate capacity to evolve biomolecules and genetic circuits of interest to a number of scientific communities.

Produce a software architecture combining low and high level instructions that simplifies control over the EVOPROG machine

Make labware and software available to the community and foster the development of alternative uses of the prototypes

Produce a platform for increasingly complex genomic engineering

Free inscription at our phage conference in Sep 15-16, 2016.

evo

Translating complex experimental protocols and fluidic machinery into a simple human level language

Deploying continuous culture processes with separate but interacting in vivo molecular biology operations can be a complex process. We aim to simplify this by generating a practical high-level graphical language that allows the wetlab researcher to abstract complexity in favour of machine level protocol optimisation.

Licensing

General-Purpose Programmable Evolution Machine by Evoprog Consortium is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.evoprog.eu.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.evoprog.eu