NSF ExFAB Biofoundry Is Fully Built and Functional

In 2024, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a six-year $22 million grant to establish the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB), a collaboration led by UC Santa Barbara in partnership with UC Riverside (UCR), and Cal Poly Pomona (CPP). Research at the nation’s first biofoundry for extreme microbes is focused on making new discoveries in largely untapped and unexplored microbes that have desirable traits to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing. The unique infrastructure in the ExFAB Biofoundry is now completely built and functional on both the UCSB and UCR campuses, allowing the all-important External User Program to launch this fall.

“We look forward with great anticipation to the discoveries that will be made through the BioFoundry as our colleagues explore new frontiers in the world of extreme microbes,” said then UCSB chancellor, Henry Yang at the time the grant was announced.

“The ExFAB is the first externally focused, external-facing facility for biology that UCSB has hosted,” said chemical engineering professor, ExFAB director, and interim chair of the Bioengineering Department, Michelle O’Malley. “So, similar to the clean room [i.e. the Nanofabrication Facility] or the MRL [Materials Research Laboratory], or any of the other pieces of key infrastructure that UCSB is known for, ExFAB is built to be the first externally facing training ground specifically for biology.”

The facility holds the promise of dramatically accelerating research into rare and exotic organisms that, until now, could not be cultivated in the lab.

O’Malley explains: “Part of what is exciting about the ExFAB is its infrastructure, which is unique in the U.S. and probably in the world for being able to create an environment in which to grow microorganisms that are very hard to grow and that we cannot grow any other way. It also fits into UCSB’s existing strength in terms of operating shared use facilities, which we are extending by establishing infrastructure so that people from outside UCSB, UCR, and CPP can use it, too. 

Ensuring broad accessibility to the facility is an indispensable part of the ExFAB endeavor. “We want people to come to UCSB and learn how to use and design experiments for this new automated robotic equipment. We are also focused on leveraging new developments where automation meets AI, machine learning, and microbiology and biotechnology,” O’Malley explained. “We hope that people will then use what they learn from the ExFAB facility in different ways. They might get ideas to start companies, or they might go back to their own institutions or their own industry and put that knowledge to work, or they might envision entirely new research projects and directions.” 

The key piece of the ExFAB is this large enclosed chamber that encloses a set of automation infrastructure, which allows researchers to carefully control the environment that the microorganism sees. “We can shut out oxygen, we can introduce a little bit of oxygen, we can change the humidity or the gas composition, and that mimics the environment that so many of these microbes see out in the world but are very difficult to grow at the bench,” O’Malley explains. “Whether we are looking at microbes that grow in compost, landfills or soil, or even in the human or gut or other mammalian guts, ExFAB will allow us to study biology and to start to template and prototype biology toward biotech solutions in ways not possible before.”