News and Activities
March 2026 — Second Annual Meeting
Incheon, Korea
The second annual meeting will bring together all project partners to discuss progress, share findings, and plan future collaborations.
July 2025 — Pioneering paper lays groundwork for smarter, connected biofoundries
London, UK
Imperial College London researchers have published groundbreaking work that establishes the foundation for more intelligent and interconnected biofoundries, advancing the field of synthetic biology automation.
June 2025 — UK-Korea Engineering Biology Symposium
London, UK
Imperial College hosted the UK-Korea symposium bringing together leading scientists, innovators, and policymakers from across the UK and South Korea. The event strengthened international collaboration in Engineering Biology and showcased exciting innovations from both countries.
June 2025 — New Memoranda of Understanding Signed
London, UK
Two new MoUs were signed, formalising collaborations between KRIBB, KAIST, and the University of Edinburgh, and between KRIBB, KAIST, and the University of Manchester. These agreements complete the formal partnership of all five institutions in the UK-Korea International Research Partnership.
June 2025 — First Annual Meeting
London, UK
Imperial College London will host UK and Korean partners for the first in-person meeting to facilitate collaboration and knowledge-sharing on biofoundry developments.
Abstraction hierarchy to define biofoundry workflows and operations for interoperable synthetic biology research and applications
Kim, H., Hillson, N.J., Cho, BK. et al. (2025). Nat Commun 16, 6056.
Lack of standardization in biofoundries limits the scalability and efficiency of synthetic biology research. Here, we propose an abstraction hierarchy that organizes biofoundry activities into four interoperable levels: Project, Service/Capability, Workflow, and Unit Operation, effectively streamlining the Design‑Build‑Test‑Learn (DBTL) cycle. This framework enables more modular, flexible, and automated experimental workflows. It improves communication between researchers and systems, supports reproducibility, and facilitates better integration of software tools and artificial intelligence. Our approach lays the foundation for a globally interoperable biofoundry network, advancing collaborative synthetic biology and accelerating innovation in response to scientific and societal challenges.