Part Promotion Process

Revision as of 23:07, 14 August 2007 by Macowell (Talk | contribs) (→‎Documentation Required)

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 match the documentation
  • 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

Parts will now be rated into five categories:

  • -2. Sandbox - Parts with no expectations of completeness or quality. These parts may never exist or be finished.
  • -1. Selected - This used to be called team or lab favorites. These parts have been selected as particularly interesting.
  • 0. Submitted - Documentation and the DNA for this part has been formally submitted to the Registry.
  • 1. * Accepted - Both the documentation and the DNA have been received by the Registry. The documentation passes a simple review for completeness and the DNA has been checked for the correct length and antibiotic resistance.
  • 2. ** Reviewed - The part has passed the Part Review Process as established by the Part Review Board. The author of a part will be invited to submit a BioBrick™ Note on the part.
  • 3. *** Confirmed - This part has been proven to work. Its parameters have been measured and/or it has been used successfully in other systems.

Documentation Required

We are working on the part documentation requirements by part category. One draft of part documentation guidelines for the part to be promoted to level 1 / accepted status is [http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/User:Macowell/Part_Documentation_Guidelines here].