Built for the Synthetic Biology Workflow: How Beckman Coulter Life Sciences Grew Up with Synbio

From liquid handlers to microbioreactors, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has been a quiet force behind some of the most innovative companies in synthetic biology for many years.

Synthetic biology didn’t begin with multimillion-dollar labs and AI automation. It started with scientists wondering if they could engineer biology—an idea that was often put to the test at spare lab benches as spunky side projects and after-hours experiments.

Synthetic biology also grew up in places like the South San Francisco Conference Center. That’s where one of the first SynBioBeta conferences took place. It was in such places that enterprising scientists began piecing together the workflows that would shape the emerging field of synthetic biology.

"In those early SynBioBeta days, it really felt like you were in the middle of something big just beginning to take shape," recalls Denise Kruse of Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. "You’d have founders and entrepreneurs sharing coffee with toolmakers like us, talking about the tools and capabilities they wish they had. That energy shaped the kinds of problems we went after."

Back then, workarounds were common. Synthetic biologists had to muscle their way to a proof-of-concept, both in their benchtop work and in product development. Manual methods were the starting point, and products began to emerge to streamline the work. 

Game-Changing Tools for Synthetic Biology 

One of the first of these was the Echo Acoustic Liquid Handler, developed by Labcyte, which was acquired by Beckman Coulter Life Sciences in 2019. Beckman tools, including automation, flow cytometers, centrifuge products, and genomic reagents, have long been used by scientists in the synbio space. And with the acquisition of m2plabs in 2020, Beckman added the BioLector XT Microbioreactor to the synbio tool kit, enabling rapid testing of organism growth conditions prior to scale-up.

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences is a Danaher Life Sciences company. Other members of the Danaher family offer products that facilitate synthetic biology workflows. Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) the original innovator of gene fragment products, offers gBlock™ and eBlock™ gene fragments synthesized to customers’ exact specifications.. Molecular Devices QPix® technology enables rapid and accurate picking of microbial colonies. And SCIEX collaborated with Beckman to create the Echo® MS+ system with mass spectrometry detection, which can be used for rapid screening of strains in the early stage of microbial fermentation engineering.

These tools sit at key junctions across the Design-Build-Test-Learn loop supporting faster feedback, better decisions and cleaner iteration. And as synthetic biology moves toward "lab-in-the-loop" systems that combine automation, data, and AI for closed-loop experimentation, they are already part of the foundation.

Fast and Flexible

But it’s not just about faster automation. It’s about smarter iteration.     Startups and large research organizations alike want tools that fit their workflow today and scale with them tomorrow. The Beckman approach is rooted in flexibility: modular systems, real-time data, and tools that talk to each other.

As SynBioBeta founder John Cumbers puts it: "These tools went from zero to one in the early days, and now they’re stacking on top of each other and scaling at a geometric pace. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible when data, biology, and automation start playing in harmony. The only real limit is imagination."

From the early days of synbio to today, being at SynBioBeta and talking with the people who are bringing synthetic biology solutions to life has helped Beckman Coulter Life Sciences keep pace with the accelerating need for even more innovation. 

"It’s always been about listening to what scientists actually need in their workflows," says Kruse. "When we’re at events like SynBioBeta, we’re not just talking tools—we’re shaping ideas, hearing what’s working and what’s missing. That helps us build solutions that are both specific to researcher needs and able to scale as those needs grow."

Looking Ahead: Smarter Integration that Maximizes Human Ingenuity

As synbio moves further into AI-driven design and automated lab systems, the next challenge isn’t just about speed, it’s about tapping into human ingenuity like never before. Beckman is leaning into that challenge by building tools that integrate seamlessly into smart labs, connect data fluidly, and shift scientists from repetitive technical tasks to higher-order thinking—freeing them to focus more on interpreting results, refining hypotheses, and accelerating discoveries that can change the world.

“The same scrappy energy that filled early SynBioBeta is now powering real-world products and ingredients found in our homes, hospitals and grocery markets,” says Cumbers. Former side projects are now scaled-up companies. Once-imagined workflows are now fully integrated loops. “Synthetic biology is no longer a room full of tinkerers seeing what they can do with a robot. It’s an entire ecosystem of tools, teams, and ideas working in harmony to build the bioeconomy from the bench up.”

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, like synbio itself, has grown from its origins as a scrappy innovator to help turn the vision of synthetic biology into the everyday reality it was always meant to be.