DBMI Bytes to Bedside ft. Chris Myers, PhD

Speaker: Chris Myers, PhD

Presentation Title: SynBioSuite: A Standard-Enabled Software System for Synthetic Biology

Presentation Description: Synthetic biology aims to rationally design novel genetic regulatory networks at the DNA level by composing genetic parts and devices to form functional circuits and systems. To date, a broad range of genetic circuits and systems have been produced with useful functional behaviors for various applications. The pace of innovation though has been limited due to the lack of standardized, machine-actionable data, which hinders reproducibility and model-driven design. This challenge is especially acute when integrating data across labs, platforms, or biological contexts. The idea of having a standardized set of abstracted DNA parts that can be composed to create genetic circuits with robust, predictable behavior has been at the core of the field since its inception. In this talk, we will present, SynBioSuite, a prototype software system to support the synthetic biology workflow. SynBioSuite utilizes open source software developed by our research group including Excel2SBOL (an effective tool to capture genetic part and other critical information), SBOLCanvas (a schematic design tool for genetic circuits), iBioSim (a computational analysis tool for biological models), XDC (a tool to standardize the ingestion of data and metadata for wet-lab experiments), and Flapjack (an experimental analysis tool for learning from results). All these tools use and produce data using standards, such as the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) and Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), and connect to the data repository SynBioHub, which is developed by our research group for sharing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and resusable) synthetic biology data.

Speaker Bio: Chris J. Myers received a BS in EE and Chinese history from Caltech, and MSEE and PhD degrees from Stanford. Before becoming Chair of ECEE at CU Boulder in 2020, he was a professor and associate chair in ECE at the University of Utah. Myers is the author of over 200 technical papers and the textbooks Asynchronous Circuit Design and Engineering Genetic Circuits. He is also a co-inventor on four patents. His research interests include asynchronous design, formal verification, and genetic circuit design. Myers received an NSF Fellowship in 1991, an NSF CAREER award in 1996, best paper awards at the 1999 and 2007 Symposiums on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems, and is a fellow of the IEEE. He is a leader in the development of standards for systems and synthetic biology. In particular, he has served as an editor for the SBML standard, chair of the steering committee for the SBOL standard, and chair of the COMBINE coordination board.