Jean Peccoud and colleagues at the Virginia Bioinformatic Institute have published their work analysing one of the clone banks derived from the BioBrick registry of parts for synthetic biology.
What they found reflects the way in which the registry has grown, particularly the ready-made clones. Peccoud and his team argues that future registries will have to pay closer attention to what the concept of a 'part' means in synthetic biology as the current definitions do not necessarily work all that well.
The VBI researchers see registries such as the BioBrick Foundation's as "complementary to de novo synthesis since both approaches can be used to fabricate designer DNA sequences".
When he spoke at BioSysBio earlier this year, Peccoud said there is a role for many types of registry. Some will be kept inhouse by companies to allow them to include their own parts. Others will tend to use publicly available libraries.
