We’ll Be Engineering & Safeguarding Synthetic Life!

Manchester, UK

17th – 19th September 

Robots on the road

We’ll be travelling out of sunny Somerset to the big smoke of Manchester this September. Two of our great friends are hosting the Engineering & Safeguarding Synthetic Life conference (ESSL). One of the best feelings in life is supporting your friends and seeing them succeed, especially when you know you’ve contributed even a small amount.

 The truth is that over the years, your methodological challenges and hiccups have become the near obsession of our engineers and scientists. And it’s largely through the generous insights (and particularly good humour) of the scientific community that Singer Instruments’ wide range of microbe-inspired products have been so spectacular.

Today our industry-leading microbial workstations have more than 10,000 citations and counting! As we raise a glass to Singer Instruments’ 90+ years of service to science, we wanted to shine a light on the astounding contributions of Matthew and Patrick to the synthetic biology community. 

Prof. Matthew Chang

The godfather of our world famous PIXL and Singer Legend

Our long time pal Matt-ey boy was half the reason PIXL is the success it is. After all, he helped design and launch it. Waaaay back in 2016, Matthew approached us to build a kick-ass colony picker that could streamline their screening. It was crucial to the NUS biofoundry that PIXL had the quality and reliability that they had consistently seen from us before. With the power of friendship we collaborated on PIXL, a colony picker designed for scientists, by scientists. Together PIXL was launched into the world at the SB7.0 conference, in Singapore, and the world of synthetic biology and genetic screening has never been the same. We are so excited to hear what SINERGY and SynCTI have been up to since.

Prof. Patrick Cai

Scrambling up synthetic biology

Patrick Cai is a staple within synthetic biology. Using PIXL to tackle the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project with his then-student (now his collaborator) Dr Daniel Schindler. PIXL was essential to their work, allowing Daniel to access the throughput required by their ambitious goal. Their collaboration in a consortium of multiple international labs led to the creation of Sc2.0. Recently, Daniel and Patrick reflected on the impact of their work (Schindler et.al., 2024). They emphasised how SCRAMBLE has enabled scientists to enhance the production of industrially significant compounds and comprehend biological phenomena by inducing genetic diversity. The Cai lab continues to lead the charge in synthetic biology through yeast research, and we have no doubt that this conference will reflect that.

See you at the conference!

Patrick and Matthew are doing far too much exciting research for us to cover in a single blog. But have no fear, I’m sure they’ll tell you themselves at the conference or you can peruse their (& others) research at our stand. Do come say hi – we may make our robot overlords, but we promise they’re not that scary.