About the registry
From 2006.igem.org
Revision as of 21:24, 30 March 2006
Introduction
The development of well-specified, standard, and interchangable biological parts is a critical step towards the design and construction of integrated biological systems. The MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts supports this goal by recording and indexing biological parts that are currently being built and offering synthesis and assembly services to construct new parts, devices, and systems. In the future, we hope to expand this support in the areas of standards for biological part families, parameter measurement and quality control, and development of an open community of biological engineers and scientists.
The Registry Today
In the summer of 2004, the registry contains about 100 basic parts such as operators, protein coding regions, and transcriptional terminators. It also includes many devices such as logic gates built from these basic parts. These parts and devices have been developed and used by student teams to build biological systems.
Assembly of parts into devices and systems is being performed using traditional cloning techniques with a set of restriction sites that allow easy composition of composite devies that, in turn, can themselves be used as parts. Simultaneous parallel assembly lets us build many student projects quickly.
The parts in the registry are not simply segments of DNA, they are functional units. Those functions are being specified and parameters measured. Proper interoperation of a family of devices will depend on compatible parameters. For example, consideration of composable system design for gene-expression-based systems has resulted in the specification of a new unit of measurement, TIPS (TranscrIpts Per Second). TIPS measure the rate of transcription at the boundaries of a part. We are now characterizing parts in terms of TIPS.
These techniques have been used in two January classes at MIT and are now being used in the Summer 2004 Synthetic Biology Compteition, a joint educational effort among students and istructors at BU, Caltech, Princeton, UT Austin, and MIT.
The Registry Tomorrow
As the registry evolves, we see these key trends and challenges.
- Parameter measurement and part 'design to specification'.
- Avoidance, control and exploitation of desired or undesired evolution of parts, devices, and systems.
- Transitioning from the collection and characterization of natural parts to the design, specification, and characterization of synthetic parts.
- Developing an open and expanding community of part designers and part users.
Today, DNA synthesis is expensive; long sequence synthesis remains problematic. It is sometimes much easier to modify a natural DNA sequence than to specify and construct one from scratch. As DNA synthesis technology becomes less expensive and overcomes technical challenges, we believe that attention will shift towards DNA design (i.e., the information specifying what DNA sequence to make will be much more important than posession of a specific DNA molecule). The specification of parts and the rules for combination into systems developed for the registry will be valuable long after physical parts repositories become historical artifacts.
