Fig. 1

Diagram of the automated workflow for the designing and building of heterologous metabolic pathways; To aid in the development of new novel metabolic pathways in microbial hosts a design-build framework was established. To build a metabolic pathway, information from data repositories is fed into BioCAD software. BioCAD constructs a comprehensive virtual assembly of every potential pathway design. Once designed, metabolic pathways are constructed and tested using automated liquid handling robotics. b To achieve an automated design-build framework with minimal human involvement, in-house software tools and data models have been developed. These tools have been installed into automated pipeline, represented by the red or yellow arrowed lines. The grey and coloured arrowed lines represent the flow of information through the process development of a heterologous metabolic pathway. a A workflow and data model has been developed to capture and disseminate part information to an online datasheet repository known as SynBIS. c An in-house software tool has been developed to convert SBOL serialised datasheets to readable CSV files to input biological part information into the JMP DoE software tool. Screenshots of the software and CSV file can be seen in the supplementary information (Additional file 1: Figure S1). d JMP DoE software tool can be utilised to design biosynthetic genetic pathways. The software tool AMOS has been developed to coordinate the building of selected samples from the design space created by JMP in liquid handling robots