PNNL Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability groundbreaking

M2PC will strengthen the connection between scientific discovery and meeting the nation's needs. Learning how microbes work may suggest a new way to produce fuel, create a biomaterial, or recover critical minerals. The M2PC user facility represents an investment by the DOE's Office of Science in the promise of biology and biotechnology to help the nation reach its energy goals. M2PC is also of vital importance to the dawn of this biotechnology revolution. M2PC will accelerate biological discovery and design and take on what I've been calling the mega grand challenge of how complex microbial systems function at the genomic level in the lab and under a range of environmental conditions. As we bring together super intelligence and automation advanced instrumentation and biological research we're not just changing how experiments are conducted, we're driving to the next frontier of exponential discovery science and what it means to be a scientist and the skills needed in this new paradigm. Microbial phenotyping is understanding the physical traits that a microbe expresses that a human can see. These can be used as fuel precursors or they can be used as providing nutrients to a plant so that the plant would grow more, so like increasing your crop productivity, for example, and so this facility will allow us to study these microbes in real-life conditions where we can change the conditions and see how the microbe responds to either make more or less of something that we might want to have useful for in manufacturing chemicals or increasing plant productivity. We did a first demonstration of a fully autonomous set of design and experiments on that system. We did three sort of what they call design, build the experiment, do the testing, and then learn. So a DBTL cycle. We did three of those in 72 hours, and it was completely autonomous. So we had AI working with our researchers to plan the experiments and then execute them on the platform all autonomously. So the example I just gave with those three DBTL cycles in 72 hours, that normally would have taken us probably about six months. We have had to do a ton of hiring around automation engineers, AI experts, technicians that know how to run these robotics, as well as the craftspeople because a lot of this has very intricate custom design machining apart. From the science perspective though, it is a national priority, biotechnology, so I could see this quite easily becoming a major emphasis for PNNL and the region.