News & Press

There are plenty of plaudits for organizations in the life sciences that change the industry’s conceptions of what is possible, but one purpose of the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards is to highlight those who refine those achievements until the merely possible becomes truly practical. That is why Bio-IT World was pleased to award an honorable mention at the 2013 Best Practices Awards to TeselaGen Biotechnology, a startup that spun out from the Berkeley Lab’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in 2011, and Amgen for the development of TeselaGen: j5, an automated platform for designing DNA assembly protocols. This new, cloud-based platform allows even small institutions to quickly find the most cost-effective protocols for assembling scarless, multipart DNA.

TeselaGen featured in article detailing how new synthetic biology tools are accelerating genetic engineering.

TeselaGen has secured an exclusive license in all fields of use for the “j5” gene assembly software from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . TeselaGen prevailed with the strongest proposal to promote and leverage the j5 technology for their rapid prototyping system for synthetic biology. Based on the idea that a forward engineering approach needs to incorporate the utility of both biology and engineering in the quest for easier and faster ways to build biomolecules, TeselaGen is expecting the j5 technology to play an important role in its software as a service offering. The j5 software package, which has attracted users from more than 250 institutions worldwide since it was made available last year, emerged from the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a Department of Energy research center established in 2007 to pursue breakthroughs in the production of cellulosic biofuels. By building on j5 and adding modules for commercial users, TeselaGen Biotechnology, says it will significantly reduce the time and cost involved with DNA synthesis and cloning, a multibillion-dollar market.