Life sciences solutions provider Agilent Technologies Inc. has entered into a partnership with cloud laboratory service Transcriptic Inc. Under the terms of their partnership the two companies will merge their technology platforms in order to facilitate synthetic and discovery biology research.Herman Verrelst, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Genomics Solutions Divisions and Clinical Applications Division, expressed his company’s eagerness to draw upon Transcriptic’s flexible automated platform. “We’re excited to combine our genome engineering tools with automated experimentation,” he commented. “Transcriptic’s services are validated, scalable, and accessible from anywhere in the world, which will enhance the market for our industry-leading reagents.Transcriptic and Agilent’s partnership will entail the addition of several Agilent product lines to Transcriptic’s cloud laboratory portfolio. With these additions, Transcriptic’s customers will have a greater number of cloning and mutagenesis protocols at their disposal when commissioning experiments through the cloud, and Agilent will further broaden its already extensive reach into the field of synthetic biology research.Transcriptic and Agilent premiered their collaborative solutions at the annual SynBioBeta SF 2016 conference and at the iGEM Giant Jamboree in October.

Transcriptic CEO Max Hodak presents their new partnership with Agilent at SynBioBeta SF 2016.Transcriptic’s “laboratory in the cloud” has already completed tens of thousands of operations for customers who have sought greater efficiency by outsourcing their synthetic biology assays. Through a web portal, researchers input the specifics of their desired experiments, which are then carried out in Transcriptic’s robotic Workcells. From their reagent dispensers to their plate readers, these Workcells are fully automated and allow for a level of scalability that the vast majority of researchers cannot practically achieve in their own labs.Now, this robotic lab is posed to learn a few new tricks as Agilent Genomics product lines become gradually integrated into Transcriptic’s Workcells. First to be assimilated will be the QuikChange Lightning line of kits for site-directed mutagenesis of plasmids up to 14 kb in length. Many synthetic biology researchers are already familiar with QuickChange kits from deploying them in their own labs, and now these samTranscriptic CEO Max Hodak presents their new partnership with Agilent at SynBioBeta SF 2016e protocols and reagents will be among Transcriptic’s offerings. The addition is expected to accelerate protein function research and discovery research for Transcriptic’s global base of customers.Transcriptic COO Yvonne Linney said of the addition that “Agilent QuikChange site-directed mutagenesis kits have an unsurpassed reputation for being reliable and easy to use. By bringing these products to Transcriptic, we will make it extremely easy for customers to scale up their research, using many mutants to produce very large data sets for exploring protein function.”Earlier this year it was announced that the Siegal lab at the UC Davis Department of Chemistry had harnessed Transcriptic’s services to produce and analyze the largest-ever uniformly generated set of enzyme variants. Their experiments, published in PLOS ONE in January of 2016, were performed through site-directed mutagenesis and may have set in motion the effort to add mutagenesis protocols to Transcriptic’s menu of assays.Transcriptic has not yet announced which of Agilent’s product lines will follow QuikChange. Agilent boasts one of the most extensive collections of kits and reagents in the life science industry, and their partnership with Transcriptic promises to widen the cloud laboratory’s user base.Another win for TranscripticThe announcement comes hot on the heels of Transcriptic’s closure of $13.4 million Series A fundraising round in November. Since its founding in 2012, the startup has raised a total of nearly $28 million in seed and Series A funds, which Transcriptic has used to build and refine its robotic laboratory and user interface.Transcriptic has made headlines for its diverse and global set of customers, including a number of prestigious academic laboratories, the winners of the UK’s first annual BioHackathon, and the Y Combinator accelerator’s biotech startups. They are forging the territory of remote control synthetic biology alongside similar startups such as Emerald Cloud Lab and Arcturus BioCloud, and have emerged as the clear leaders in the small but quickly growing movement toward automated outsourced experimentation.