Benchling Announces First of Its Kind Molecular Biology 2.0 Software Enabling Scientists to Run Thousands of Experiments At Once

Extension of Molecular Biology Suite to Power High-Throughput Sequence Design for DNA, Proteins and CRISPR

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31, 2017 — Benchling, the next-generation life science R&D software company, today announced the release of its Molecular Biology 2.0 system, an unprecedented extension of its existing molecular biology suite to power high-throughput sequence design for DNA, proteins, and CRISPR. Molecular Biology 2.0 incorporates batch sequence design, CRISPR design, and cloning software, as well as full-fledged protein design and alignment tools, with the Benchling platform's natively integrated bioregistration system and lab notebook. For more information on Benchling's platform, or a tour of the software, please visit here.

Molecular Biology 2.0 brings the unique biological contextualization afforded by the Benchling Bioregistry to high-throughput molecular biology work conducted by industry scientists. This allows for intelligent linkages between plasmids, protein sequences, and the parts they encode and offers transformative functionality for many areas of drug discovery, such as immunotherapy, gene therapy, synthetic biology, and antibody discovery. In antibody discovery, for example, this allows a scientist to create a plasmid encoding for a heavy chain, define a field on that plasmid that links to a protein sequence for the heavy chain, and apply a constraint to confirm that the amino acids linked to are a translation of that region of the plasmid. Combined with Molecular Biology 2.0's batch sequence design and cloning tools, which allow scientists to design sequences and, in an industry-first, translate protein chains in batch, Benchling has effectively created the first ELN-based batch antibody engineering tool.

"As our clients do higher- and higher-throughput work, we want to stay one step ahead of them so that they're never held back by their software," said Ashu Singhal, Co-Founder of Benchling. "In accomplishing this, Molecular Biology 2.0 opens up unimagined possibilities for scientists. Especially as the industry trends more towards automation and externalization, with biotechs designing hundreds or thousands of experiments at once, software has to be able to support that."

Following its funding announcements and the launch of its bioregistration system in 2016, Benchling has established itself as the major new player in the preclinical R&D informatics space. The company provides a unified cloud platform consisting of an electronic lab notebook, bioregistration and sample management system, and molecular biology suite to over 50,000 scientists globally.

Beyond Molecular Biology 2.0's protein design and alignment and batch design and cloning tools, Benchling has developed the first batch CRISPR design tool for enterprise use. Building on top of the Benchling platform's CRISPR tool, which was co-developed with leading academic labs at MIT and Harvard and boasts speeds 100x faster than its leading competitor, batch CRISPR empowers scientists to design guides and gather on-target and off-target scores for hundreds of genes simultaneously. The tool automatically detects exons for each gene and conducts the full analysis in seconds. Benchling is already the de facto platform used by many of the most innovative CRISPR companies and teams around the world.

Said Singhal, "We are a biologics-focused company. That's why we continue to put time and effort into aligning our molecular biology tools with the latest science."