Laying the groundwork for data-driven evolution

Pioneer Labs is engineering microbial evolution to optimize performance on tasks such as biomanufacturing on Mars. But what's the BEST way to achieve this? Natural evolution, fully AI-driven design, or something in between? At Pioneer Labs, we believe in data-driven research. We aim to gather real, quantitative data on the fitness changes that result from evolution and engineering, then measure which approach is best. Furthermore, we need to gather this data at scale in order to enter the regime of big data and unlock the path for computationally driven projects using tools such as machine learning.

With an eye to these long-term goals, we are already establishing experimental platforms that will pave the way for big data efforts. This is the first of two articles that describe our bioinformatics approach, which yields quantitative measurements of evolutionary fitness at scale.