Analysis of the SBOL iGEM Data Set
Abstract
Synthetic biology is a movement to standardize genetic engineering and make it more repeatable. An important advancement was the development of standardized genetic parts known as BioBricks, which can be composed using restriction enzyme assembly. The iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machines) competition is an important synthetic biology outreach activity which is run by the iGEM foundation in keeping with their principles of the advancement of synthetic biology via education, competition, and development of an open and collaborative community. As part of the iGEM competition students submit records of any ‘parts’ they create to the iGEM registry (http://parts.igem.org/Main_Page). The iGEM registry was converted to the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) data format, a standard language for describing genetic designs, and a preliminary analysis of the data was carried out to predict the size of a potential library as well as quantify current problems with the registry data set.
