“Like most life-sciences fields, synthetic biology faces issues with reproducibility (see Nature 515, 7; 2014). It has proved difficult for labs to replicate strains engineered by others, which is hampering progress in industry and in academic research. One lab may not provide enough information about how a part was made for another to reproduce the work. Or researchers may toil to refine a process, only to find that the developer has already done that work without reporting it in the literature.
“It’s just difficult to know all the information out there, because there isn’t a set of standard ways to describe what we know about a biological resource,” says Ryan Ritterson, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, San Francisco…
The NIST-led effort is not the first attempt at standardizing the tools and methods of synthetic biology. The Synthetic Biology Open Language project is an online consortium that is developing standard nomenclature, symbols and other tools to describe engineered systems. The BioBricks Foundation has designed a licence to facilitate the free exchange of biological parts. And several repositories make and distribute such parts.”
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