On September 17, researchers from UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, and Cal Poly Pomona gathered with donors, industry members, and students to celebrate the launch of the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB). With the support of a six-year, $22 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the new facility will allow researchers to make novel discoveries using previously unstudied microbes that could generate advances in biotechnology and biomanufacturing. More than fifty people attended the event in Elings Hall, where speakers from The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering and NSF cited the BioFoundry as the latest example of UCSB’s longtime leadership in translating research into real-world impact. 

“ExFAB is our first endeavor that bridges marine sciences, bioengineering, and biotechnology with a focus on what is important for the future economy, and the climate of our state and our country,” said Rachel Segalman, a professor of chemical engineering and UCSB’s Vice Chancellor for Research, who was the event’s first speaker. “It is focused not just on the innovation of what kind of microorganisms could make us new products and what are those new products useful for, but also on how we develop the next generation of researchers and support entrepreneurship."

Umesh Mishra, dean of the College of Engineering, said that UCSB had a long history of turning research into technologies that impact daily life. He referred specifically to materials professor Shuji Nakamura’s work on LED lighting, which earned him the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. “To me, getting something in the hands of a human being is as important as writing a paper in Nature,” Mishra said. He thanked the attendees and NSF, noting that Santa Barbara and the surrounding area is a hotbed for startups and the financial support they require, and that the UCSB  administration encourages both innovation and collaboration, noting, “ExFAB represents everything that's good about UCSB.”

Steve Peretti, NSF program director for cellular and biochemical engineering, spoke to the attendees by videoconference about the role of biofoundries in reflecting NSF priorities by such actions as establishing laboratories that can connect through the cloud, preparing for novel products to come to market, and expanding education efforts to train both industrial and academic workforces. “If you look at all the things that ExFAB director Michelle O’Malley and her team have been doing, one of the reasons why we were wowed by their proposal and continue to be impressed with their progress is that they are doing all these things, and they're doing them all well.” He cited UCSB’s collaboration with other institutions, such as UC Riverside and Cal Poly Pomona, as an important part of their research capabilities and a foundation for scientists of the future. “The collaboration with the Cal State system is incredible, and I think it's going to lead to the sort of workforce development that we really are excited about,” he said.

While some might think that ExFAB’s state-of-the-art automation and robotics might reduce, rather than build, a human workforce, O’Malley, who is interim chair of the Bioengineering Department, said that this facility will allow researchers at all levels to do what they do best: designing experiments and understanding the data that emerges. “The BioFoundry is really meant to speed up the pace of biology,” she said. “We always need that human in the loop — and all the students and PIs in the room, that human is you. We want to make sure that we are building a workforce that's knowledgeable in these automated robotic pipelines, because that leads to innovation.”

UCSB earth science professor and ExFab co-PI David Valentine discussed how his research aligns with the new facility. Valentine studies the interaction between microbes and chemicals in the ocean, including the effect of offshore DDT pollution — work that appears in the documentary Out of Plain Sight. On the sea floor, he said, “There are microbes that have been exposed to these chemicals for eighty years. They've been metabolizing it. They figured out ways to break down these chlorinated compounds slowly.” 

With ExFAB, Valentine and other researchers can investigate how those microbes respond to pollution and, potentially, use what they learn to enhance remediation. “We've got the ability to engineer capabilities that these organisms have evolved over times, both to study and, ultimately, understand and, perhaps, apply nature's remedies.”   

Following the presentation, attendees toured ExFAB’s automated chamber on the second floor of Elings Hall.

During her presentation, Segalman, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, noted the difficulty of holding this celebration at a time when federal funding for research is threatened. “We're all here because we love research,” she said. “We understand why it’s important. We all need to get better at figuring out how to explain that, not just to each other, but to our neighbors, to the people standing next to us in the grocery store.”