BIOFAB Project

BIOFAB, the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology initiative, was founded in December 2009 as the world's first biological design-build facility. This professionally staffed public-benefit facility was initiated by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is led by bioengineers from UC Berkeley and Stanford University. The BIOFAB is operated in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).

BioFab projects will be designed to produce broadly useful collections of standard biological parts that can be made freely available to both academic and commercial users, while also enabling the rapid design and prototyping of genetic constructs needed to support specific needs of partner efforts such as SynBERC Testbeds. The BioFab will thus also represent the first significant focused investment in the development of open technology platforms underlying and supporting the next generation of biotechnology. Once fully operational the BioFab facility will be capable of producing tens of thousands of professionally engineered, high quality standard biological parts each year.