| Several researchers at partner
institutions of the NSF-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center
(SynBERC) have published the first formalized datasheet for a standard
biological device, as well as a generic process for developing many such
devices and their accompanying datasheets. This is an important step
because a central tenet of synthetic biology is that by “blackboxing” the
complexity of biology, or uncovering the parts that make up a device, engineers
will ultimately be able to manufacture many easy-to-use genetic devices
that function as expected.
In an issue of the Nature
Biotechnology journal, Drew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), recent SynBERC PhD graduate Barry Canton, and Anna Labno of the
University of California, Berkeley, where the ERC is headquartered, developed
a first datasheet to concisely describe a cell-cell communication device’s
inputs and outputs, its operating context, and its quantitative behavior.
The datasheet represents
the first concrete attempt to show what standardized biology might look
like. Canton, the lead author of the paper, selected a cell-cell
communicator device that used homoserine lactone as an input and polymerase
per second (PoPS) as an output. Using PoPs as a standard output signal
permits any researcher to combine this device with other devices that accept
a PoPS input. Many such PoPs-accepting devices already exist in the
Registry of Parts developed by SynBERC, and dozens of derivative systems
using the communicator have already been assembled by iGEM teams around
the world.
“It’s economically and socially
important that we improve the efficiency, reliability, and predictability
of our biological designs,” says fellow SynBERC researcher Adam Arkin in
an accompanying editorial. Arkin, also at the University of California,
Berkeley, argued that the emerging standards for describing modular biological
devices may lead to more efficient, predictable, and design-driven genetic
engineering. The abstraction of standardized, functional biological
parts and their rules for composition is needed for biology to fully mature
as an engineering discipline. “However difficult and imperfect our standards
may be,” Arkin urges, “let’s push this idea to its limits and see where
it will take us.” While much work remains to be done to develop these
standards, and they will not be completed in the near term, this paper
was an important first step that will help other researchers produce datasheets
for other standard synthetic biological devices. |
