Equipment: MRI: Track 1 Acquisition of an Illumina NextSeq 2000 Sequencing Instrument

This award supports the acquisition of an Illumina NexSeq 2000 next generation sequencing system to be housed at the Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Process (DAMP) Laboratory at Boston University. The DAMP Lab is an automated biology laboratory comprised of eight liquid handling robots that can run thousands of experiments at a time in tiny wells of liquid. These robots do a much better and faster job of transferring liquids from place to place than humans can. The DAMP Lab performed thousands of COVID tests during the pandemic, and now its instruments are used to create and study new molecular tools. The Illumina sequencer will help researchers study the genomic sequences of these new molecular tools. Small changes in the sequence can lead to big changes in performance. Next generation sequencing has an unparalleled ability to see which changes enhance or diminish function. This new instrument will help support the design of better drugs and new diagnostics and biosensors. The DAMP Lab at Boston University is a Core Facility that serves BU, Boston area academics and industry, and has the potential to serve researchers across the nation through our completely cloud based automated laboratory system. Access to next generation sequencing technology will unlock new insights across the convergent areas of biotechnology and bioengineering. Addition of the Illumina NexSeq 2000 will impact three major areas of research at BU: Organoid Profiling, Environmental and Water Monitoring, and Biosensing and Diagnostics. Over the pandemic, Boston University built an automated molecular biology laboratory, now part of the DAMP Lab, that is focused on accelerating synthetic biology research. Addition of this instrument to the existing suite of automation will dramatically increase the services we can offer users. This unique cloud-based laboratory has already made many sophisticated wet biological protocols accessible to laboratories and researchers who don’t have the in-house resources or expertise to perform them – or who might not have a wet laboratory at all. Addition of this instrument will open next generation sequencing (NGS) to these same groups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.