AutoBioTech─A Versatile Biofoundry for Automated Strain Engineering.

The inevitable transition from petrochemical production processes to renewable alternatives has sparked the emergence of biofoundries in recent years. Manual engineering of microbes will not be sufficient to meet the ever-increasing demand for novel producer strains. Here we describe the AutoBioTech platform, a fully automated laboratory system with 14 devices to perform operations for strain construction without human interaction.

Direct, Precise Measurements of Isotopologue Abundance Ratios in CO Using Molecular Absorption Spectroscopy: Application to ΔO.

We present an ultrasensitive absorption spectrometer based on a 30 Hz/s stability, sub-kHz line width laser source coupled to a high-stability cavity-ring-down-spectroscopy setup. It provides direct and precise measurements of the isotopic ratios δO and δO in CO. We demonstrate the first optical absorption measurements of O anomalies in CO with a precision better than 10 ppm, matching the requirements for paleo-environmental applications.