seqWell and Agile BioFoundry Partner to Develop Automated High-Throughput Genotyping Solution to Advance Synthetic Construct Screening

Collaboration aims to accelerate strain engineering for biomanufacturing through automated, high-throughput sequence validation

BEVERLY, MA, April 29, 2025, seqWell, a global provider of genomic library and multiplexing workflow solutions and the Agile BioFoundry (ABF), a consortium of National Labs supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office, today announced the execution of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to develop cost-effective, high-throughput workflows for whole genome sequencing (WGS) and insertion site screening to drive synthetic biology initiatives.

Synthetic biology’s Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle lies at the core of engineering biological systems including host strain engineering. The efficiency of the DBTL cycle relies heavily on accurate and rapid screening of thousands-to-millions of permutations within construct libraries created using modern molecular biology tools.  However, the cost and throughput of genotypic screening using traditional approaches, such as Sanger sequencing, can become a bottleneck.

“Host strain engineering using a DBTL approach offers limitless potential to advance biomanufacturing of fuels and chemicals – one of ABF’s goals,” said Nathan Hillson, Lead Principal Investigator, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.   “Our goal is to fast-track strain engineering by developing an NGS library prep workflow that can process 1000+ samples per batch while reducing the per-sample cost by 30%, without sacrificing sequence data quality.”

As part of the collaboration, ABF and seqWell will optimize miniaturized, automated workflows for NGS-based genotyping of synthetic construct libraries using seqWell’s TnX™ next generation transposase library prep solutions on the Beckman Coulter Echo Acoustic Liquid Handling system.

“seqWell’s high-throughput NGS library prep solutions open up new avenues in genome engineering that were previously constrained by the burdens of traditional sequencing methods,” says Jack Leonard, Co-founder and CTO at seqWell. “ABF’s leadership in synthetic biology, characterized by their comprehensive DBTL capabilities and their successful track record in bioprocess scale-up, is crucial for the success of this collaboration.”