Part Promotion Process

The Registry is committed to providing a broad collection of high quality parts. The users of the Registry need parts that are well documented and accurate. Some of the users will search the Registry of useful parts while others will know what they want and will come to the Registry to see if it is available from the Registry. Both uses of parts must be supported.

The parts in the Registry come from many sources. From iGEM team members, from Biology Labs, and from other collections. Some of the parts were built specifically for the Registry while others were made or gathered for other purposes and are submitted to the Registry just in case someone else wants them.

Every spring, the Registry prepares all of the available parts and sends the complete collection to every iGEM team. When requested, the Registry also sends the collection to member labs. In 2007, the collection included about 1500 parts. We expect that the 2007 iGEM teams alone will add 500 to 1000 parts to the collection.

The Registry software and Wiki approach gives part contributors great freedom to describe and document their parts. But, unfortunately for the users of these parts, many contributors do not provide good enough descriptions and documentation to make use of these parts.

The BioBrick™ Part Promotion Process is intended to increase the value of the Registry for both part contributors and part users. It has these features and components:

• Better processes for assuring that physical parts
• Better descriptions of guidelines and requirements
• A rating system for part quality
• Peer review of part contributions with a Part Review Board
• Publication of part contributions in a peer-reviewed journal
• More comprehensive part categorization
• Better searching tools
• A better user interface
• An explicit method and category for libraries of similar parts and bulk part entry