{"id":544545,"date":"2019-03-11T15:56:07","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T22:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-project&p=544545"},"modified":"2021-09-28T09:10:36","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T16:10:36","slug":"stationb","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/stationb\/","title":{"rendered":"Station B"},"content":{"rendered":"
Our work on the Station B project has now been retired. We continue to actively explore the exciting intersection of computing and life sciences, with other projects located on\u00a0www.microsoft.com\/research. (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n The ability to program biology could enable fundamental breakthroughs across a broad range of industries, including medicine (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, agriculture (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, food (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, construction (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, textiles (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, materials (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and chemicals (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. It could also help lay the foundation for a future bioeconomy (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> based on sustainable technology. Despite this tremendous potential, programming biology today is still done largely by trial-and-error. To tackle this challenge, the field of synthetic biology (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> has been working collectively for almost two decades to develop new methods and technology for programming biology. Station B is part of this broader effort, with a focus on developing an integrated platform that enables selected partners to improve productivity within their own organisations, in line with Microsoft’s core mission (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. The Station B project builds on over a decade of research at Microsoft on understanding and programming information processing in biological systems (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, in collaboration with several leading universities. The name Station B is directly inspired by Station Q (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, which launched Microsoft’s efforts in quantum computing (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, but focuses instead on biological computing.<\/p>\n The Station B platform is being developed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, which houses Microsoft’s first molecular biology laboratory. The platform aims to improve all phases of the Design-Build-Test-Learn workflow typically used for programming biological systems:<\/p>\n These phases will be integrated with a biological knowledge base<\/em> that stores computational models representing the current understanding of the biological systems under consideration. As new experiments are performed, the knowledge base will be updated via automated learning.<\/p>\nBuilding a platform for programming biology<\/h2>\n
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