Opportunities for Funding and/or Engagement

“Biology is nature’s ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions.” – DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar, Testimony to Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, U.S. House of Representatives, March 26, 2014

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeks innovative ideas to support advances in synthetic biology and engineering biology broadly, through in vivo nucleic acid sequencing and/or synthesis. Real-time reading and writing of nucleic acid in living cells would enable continuous monitoring of gene expression and dynamic reprogramming of cell function, offering the potential to expand applications of engineered living systems to address real-world challenges.

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeks innovative ideas to support development and application of engineered compartmentalization in cells and/or cell-free systems. The ability to engineer compartmentalization should enable advances in synthetic biology and engineering biology. For the purposes of this RFI, such compartmentalization includes, for example, protein- or membrane-bound organelles, biomolecular scaffolding, DNA origami, or other biological strategies to achieve localized function in space and/or time in cells and/or cell-free systems.