A Novel Tool for Assisted In-silico Cloning and Sequence Editing in Molecular Biology

Abstract

Nowadays most of the protocols used in biotechnology can be fully simulated and checked in-silico before being carried out in-vitro. Given the high level of complexity of the molecular phenomena involved in such protocols it has been observed that a consistent amount of money can be saved by both designing and simulating strategies like in-silico cloning that minimizes the probability of man-made error to occur. This aspect became especially relevant with the advent of disciplines like synthetic biology strongly relying on molecular biology protocols. Here we propose a new software package intended to provide molecular and synthetic biologists with an off-the-shelf tool to simulate widely used protocols in everyday lab practice. Here we describe routines meant to assist researchers through the whole experiment: from the cloning strategy design to the alignment of predicted and actual results. Cues for further research in this field are provided in the final part of the manuscript.