{"id":274,"date":"2022-10-05T20:28:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T20:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/?p=274"},"modified":"2022-12-05T21:58:34","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T21:58:34","slug":"wiswo-receives-1-million-nsf-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/2022\/10\/05\/wiswo-receives-1-million-nsf-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikswo receives $1 million NSF award"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/engineering.vanderbilt.edu\/bio\/john-wikswo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">John Wikswo<\/a>, founder and director of the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/viibre\/wikswo.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education<\/a> and Gordon A. Cain University Professor, is the principal investigator of a <a href=\"https:\/\/news.vanderbilt.edu\/2022\/03\/04\/wikswo-and-viibre-team-on-track-to-build-third-gen-self-driving-lab-with-1m-from-national-science-foundation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">$1 million award from the National Science Foundation<\/a>. The object is to build a pathbreaking \u201crobot scientist\u201d\u2014a fully automated microfluidic system for parallel, independent, long-duration, machine-guided experiments. The target organisms are the single-cell eukaryotic yeast <em>Saccharomyces cerevisiae<\/em>, commonly known as brewer\u2019s and baker\u2019s yeast, the bacterium <em>Escherichia coli <\/em>and other microbes used in commercial biotechnologies, and the Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells used to produce antibody-based drugs and vaccines.<\/p>\n<p>Wikswo had previously developed an award-winning <a href=\"https:\/\/ncats.nih.gov\/pubs\/features\/microformulator\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MultiWell MicroFormulator<\/a> to recreate in a plastic, 96-well plate the time-dependent drug concentrations that previously could be replicated only in animals. In 2020, Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenberg, Sweden, and the developer of Adam and Eve, the first robot scientists, recruited Wikswo to convert the MicroFormulator into a third-generation robot scientist, Genesis, to provide King\u2019s group with thousands of miniature, self-driving chemostats that will be used to understand yeast metabolism and signaling. Realizing that a self-driving biological laboratory has many other applications, Wikswo sought NSF funds to create a Genesis system at Vanderbilt that could be used not only for fundamental studies of yeast but also of the breadth of cells used in biotechnologies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Wikswo, founder and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education and Gordon A. Cain University Professor, is the principal investigator of a $1 million award from the National Science Foundation. The object is to build a pathbreaking \u201crobot scientist\u201d\u2014a fully automated microfluidic system for parallel, independent, long-duration, machine-guided experiments. The&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-cas\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/38\/2022\/12\/22080205\/JohnWikswo.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}