The case for decoupling assembly and submission standards to maintain a more flexible registry of biological parts

Razan N Alnahhas; Ben Slater; Yunle Huang; Catherine Mortensen; Jordan W Monk; Yousef Okasheh; Marco D Howard; Neil R Gottel; Michael J Hammerling; Jeffrey E Barrick

doi:10.1186/1754-1611-8-28

The case for decoupling assembly and submission standards to maintain a more flexible registry of biological parts

J Biol Eng. 2014 Dec 1;8(1):28. doi: 10.1186/1754-1611-8-28. eCollection 2014.

Affiliation

¹ Department of Molecular Biosciences, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712 USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The Registry of Standard Biological Parts only accepts genetic parts compatible with the RFC 10 BioBrick format. This combined assembly and submission standard requires that four unique restriction enzyme sites must not occur in the DNA sequence encoding a part. We present evidence that this requirement places a nontrivial burden on iGEM teams developing large and novel parts. We further argue that the emergence of inexpensive DNA synthesis and versatile assembly methods reduces the utility of coupling submission and assembly standards and propose a submission standard that is compatible with current quality control strategies while nearly eliminating sequence constraints on submitted parts.

Keywords: Assembly standard; BioBrick; Biological part; DNA assembly; Gene synthesis; Gibson assembly; Registry of standard biological parts; Submission standard; Synthetic biology.