Bioinformatics Services for Data-Driven Design of Cell Factories and Communities (DD-DeCaF)

Research Project, 2016 – 2020

The European Commission has awarded 6.3 million Euros to a four-year collaborative project on data-driven design of cells and microbial communities for applications ranging from human health to sustainable production of chemicals. With advances in synthetic biology genomes can now be edited at unprecedented speed allowing making multiple changes in the same genome at the same time. This increases the need for computational tools to design cells and communities of cells analogous to the tools used in Computer Aided Design of cars, buildings and other man-made objects. In biotechnology these design tools need to be able to use existing large-scale databases to discover new parts and place them in the functioning context of the cell. The tools need to be easily accessible and provide an intuitive visual map of the cell to the biotechnologists working in the lab on building better cell factories and communities.

The project, called DD-DeCaF (Bioinformatics Services for Data-Driven Design of Cell Factories and Communities) brings together leading academic partners from five European universities with five innovative European companies to address the challenge of building a comprehensive design tool. The academic partners will develop cutting edge methods for using large scale data to design cell factories and communities for biotechnological applications. Three innovative Small/Medium Enterprise partners will convert these advanced methods to software tools that can be used by non-experts and to build intuitive visualizations of biological networks. These tools will be tested and applied to real world cell factory development projects by end-user partners.