Frequently Used Parts

The iGEM Registry has a vast collection of parts that have been contributed over the course of our 10 year history. We have more than 20 thousand parts that iGEMers, graduate students, postdocs, PIs and even high schoolers have contributed to the collection.

In the beginning of iGEM, it was difficult to get experiments to work as expected. As the competition matured and labs became more used to making and testing BioBricks, more things worked, but not much documentation was contributed. Finally, we required iGEMers to submit highly-documented parts to be eligible for medals. This may not seem like a big change for a single team, but we're building the Registry for future teams.

The job or every iGEMer and contributor to the Registry is to make their part as awesome as possible to inspire students to use it in following years. With over 20,000 parts already in our collection, this is not an easy feat. We encourage everybody who contributes to the Registry to complete as much information as possible and to perform as much characterization as possible before sending us a sample.

The purpose of this page is to showcase the most highly-used parts in our collection so you may see how iGEMers on different teams approach making great parts.

At the time of writing, our most frequently used part is BBa_b0034. This ribosome binding site, first described my Michael Elowitz in 1999 has been used over 8000 times in the history of the Registry. You can find the number of uses for each part in the part quick reference box at the top of each part page.