Biological Parts Registry Current State of Affairs

[Christopher Monaco]

Hi all,

I’m getting ready to gear up our synbio efforts at my DIYbio space and was looking iGEM and their biological parts registry as routes to go. It seems really difficult to have acess to the tools they offer and I’m honestly not sure if there’s even a community iGEM track anymore. Based on posts on this mailing list (the most recent of which are several years old), it looks like the DIYbio community has more or less given up hope of having a working relationship with these folks. Which is a real shame because closing off access to parts from the public does not seem like any way to further the mission of innovating bioengineering.

Anyway, that long intro is to ask what are people in this community doing when wanting to perform synthetic biology? Is there another parts respository out there other than the one controlled by iGEM? Do you just have the requisite parts synthesized? I guess the big question is how can someone unaffiliated with an institution do work in this field?

[Francis Lee]

Hi Chris,

iGEM has a pretty good working relationship with Community Labs.  We register as a different team type for the competition (see here).  Aside from competing in the competition, you can still register your group with the Parts Registry (see here) to access kits.   At Boslab, we also get parts samples from Addgene,  Note: these methods can only be done through an company or registered non-profit.  Without them, some people just request them through the mailing list, or order them from The ODIN.   

Hope this helps,

Francis

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[Christopher Monaco]

Thanks Francis. I didnt realize that community labs could register with the iGEM labs program (we are a registered non-profit). I’ll look into all this.

[Koeng]

Eh basically given up. They have no plans on lowering their fees to entry, so it's not like many labs can afford to go, when they could be spending resources on actual projects. There isn't really the goal of innovating in bioengineering anymore on the institutional level: that stopped years ago when the original MIT folks went to do their own things (like Ginkgo). It's now much more about putting on a very nice show, which gets funders, so they can do a better show. 

I'm working on the FreeGenes project (have for a while) on building another parts repository that is actually open source (iGEM simply doesn't use terms or conditions with their plasmid stocks, we're using the OpenMTA). It turns out it's actually really hard to build large quantities of parts: for about a year we messed around with in house cloning, and got pretty far, but now we're just ordering clonal DNA directly from Twist. I'm beginning to hit on toolkits that are generally useful by spreading out the number of suppliers we have rather than cleverness to clone hard things in house, so it's just taking a while. It's also just hard to scale the DNA design process.

The FreeGenes parts collections aren't out yet, but will be sooner or later. For now, if you want parts and are unaffiliated with an institution, you either know people, get them from the odin, or get affiliated. 

koeng

[poli]

The Free Genes Project is just the kind of DNA distribution model I think biohackers should be pursuing. I sent a private email to discuss possible collaborations. Let me know about your priorities for types of genes and I can help do some R&D based on that.