Synthetic biology is an emerging interdisciplinary research field and a new research paradigm serving life sciences, with enormous potential for development. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, some representative enterprises and projects are emerging, and Yanjin Technology founded by Chao Ran, a returnee from the United States, is one of them. Not long ago, Chao Ran successfully formed an original agricultural breeding gene sequence using a self built high-throughput protein design and testing platform. As one of the first batch of companies to settle in Hangzhou Digital Medicine, the European and American Alumni Association Overseas Returnees Town, Chao Ran and his team are using the self-developed intelligent flexible life foundry system to develop high-value biosynthetic products for industries such as daily chemical and feed. "How to liberate scientific researchers from mechanical work and put them into places where creativity is more needed?" Chao Ran, a freshman in Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University, received funding from the National Undergraduate Innovation Training Program. He extracted compounds from orange peel, recycled foam plastics, and made particleboard, plywood, and developed insect resistant products. Later, he went to study at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and later pursued a PhD in Chemistry and Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the United States. During his doctoral studies, Chao Ran has been engaged in research on high-throughput synthetic biology methods and has led the development of the world's earliest fully automated biofoundry system. In his research, Chao Ran realized that although biotechnology has achieved extensive results in fields such as healthcare, biochemistry, and basic research, the research process still relies on a large number of non-standard manual operations, which have high costs, low efficiency, high error rates, and a lack of reproducibility in experiments. These have always been bottlenecks limiting the development of the industry. For example, the process of developing fermentation strains requires a large amount of "trial and error" in unknown directions, and the "trial and error" process requires researchers with master's and doctoral levels to perform gene editing and expression. This manual "trial and error" method is very slow. In order to expand scale, enterprises often need to hire dozens to hundreds of researchers to perform various labor-intensive repetitive manual labor... "How to free researchers from mechanical work and invest them in places that require more creativity?" Chao Ran has been thinking. "Conducting research in schools is more about pursuing high-precision and cutting-edge concept validation, but in order to truly do this system well and connect various processes of high-throughput biology, it is necessary to solidly develop every engineering category in interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics software development, hardware automation, and molecular biology." Chao Ran said. Thanks to his expertise in both engineering and biology, Chao Ran decided to make good use of his interdisciplinary advantages. He and his research team participated in the development of an intelligent and flexible life foundry prototype at the University of Illinois, achieving automation in multiple synthetic biology research and development processes. Later, Chao Ran and several like-minded classmates jointly founded LifeFoundry Company. The team has made the engineering transformation cycle of design, construction, testing, and learning more convenient through the modularization and standardization of biological systems. Based on this, the research and development process of synthetic biology has been further automated and industrialized. “
Edit： Responsible editor：
Source：
Special statement: if the pictures and texts reproduced or quoted on this site infringe your legitimate rights and interests, please contact this site, and this site will correct and delete them in time. For copyright issues and website cooperation, please contact through outlook new era email：lwxsd@liaowanghn.com
Sci-Tech
Recommended Reading Change it 
Home
