Many workflows in synthetic biology require processes to be carried out manually, when they could instead be facilitated by automated resources. A properly constructed toolset could not only improve efficiency in current workflows; it could provide the resources necessary to engineer more scalable mechanisms and tackle more daunting challenges in synthetic biology. TASBE (A Tool-Chain to Accelerate Synthetic Biological Engineering), a tool set that can be used to automate steps from organism level description to cell assembly, is one of the first steps being taken towards automating processes in synthetic biology. Improvements need to be made on the usability of TASBE so that any synthetic biologist can make use of the toolset. Better tools should allow for quicker high-quality results.

I am a 2016 in course 6-3 with an interest in pure sciences, especially biology. My SuperUROP project is to build an IDE and tool set for the language developed for the Proto Biocompiler for synthetic biologists. I plan to build on existing open source software, which should allow me to leverage my engineering experience gained in industry. I hope to learn about how software can be used to streamline processes in science.