Building a bio-automation pipeline for the experimental validation of cross-species codon optimisation of heterologous proteins

Codon optimisation allows for maximisation of the efficiency of protein expression within the selected host organism, and is a common practice in work with heterologous proteins. To save time, we have implemented an evolutionary algorithm that performs such optimisation against multiple species at once, called Chimera Evolve. It has good in silico performance, but have not been validated in vivo. The main challenge here is the large number of codon variants to test. To increase our capacity for testing, we had to design and build a high-throughput bio-automation pipeline.

In this talk, I will discuss the experimental validation process designed for the Chimera Evolve algorithm, and describe the semi-automated pipeline for building and testing codon optimised fluorescent protein variants.