Morph Bioinformatics Limited is a UKBiotech company offering automated lab and IT solutions for bioinformaticians and bioscientists. Its incorporation in April 2013 has evolved from the Synthetic Biology competition iGEM 2012. Our aim is to provide a platform to develop tools and services to increase the efficiency and productivity of R&D processes within the field of biotechnology. Therefor we apply bioprocess engineering principles with expertise in genetic engineering to develop a robotic laboratory platform which decouples the scientist from the physical aspects of experimentation Our ethos is to integrate molecular biology, bioprocess engineering and artificial intelligence to allow research to be done in a new way - quickly, cheaply, reproducibly, in massive parallel and fully automated.
Codon Usage Optimizer
The CUO app was developed for the Algae Department at UCL, but can be easily adopted for any host organism. Since CUO is based on specific algorithms written for algal cells, its performance was found to be better than the existing tools. The idea was to make a science as a service business. Making it open source would attract users and developers, while special features like customized solutions on request were added to bring in early revenue. But the team realized that the standalone product was not enough to build a sustainable business. Thus, they came up with Lab Officer.
The app allows scientists to view sequence and structure files in popular database formats, edit or annotate them, align sequences, predict restriction digestion bands, check for optimum buffers, and more. It is a mobile workbench to perform in-silico genetic engineering. Dropbox integration and the option to share sequences via email makes life easier for researchers. Unlike in CUO, Lab Officer doesn’t give better results than desktop-based tools. It just makes visualizing and editing sequences a lot easier to do. The company will be soon releasing an upgrade with special features and developing for other popular operating platforms (as of now, its available only for iOS) as well. In the meantime, they drifted a bit into automation.
Automating genetic engineering
The company’s next product is Cyclone, a tool for automation of cloning procedures. A user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop features allows bioscientists to design their desired construct. The user is provided with suggestions on the protocol as per his preferences. The user can then perform the experiment in his lab or have the robots take care of the boring stuff. The time wasted on pipetting and waiting for cells to grow could be invested in doing the actual science that is designing experiments and analyzing the results. The data obtained is linked to a social database where the users can look what other users are doing, collaborate, and help speed up discoveries in biotech. Other than the speed, automation has major advantages such as real-time monitoring, control and manipulation, and proper documentation of the data generated.
