Time to Get Serious about Measurement in Synthetic Biology.

For synthetic biology to mature, composition of devices into functional systems must become routine. This requires widespread adoption of comparable and replicable units of measurement. Interlaboratory studies organized through the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition show that fluorescence can be calibrated with simple, low-cost protocols, so fluorescence should no longer be published without units.

[1]  Jacob Beal,et al.  Accurate predictions of genetic circuit behavior from part characterization and modular composition. , 2015, ACS synthetic biology.

[2]  Drew Endy,et al.  Precise and reliable gene expression via standard transcription and translation initiation elements , 2013, Nature Methods.

[3]  Jacob Beal,et al.  Reproducibility of Fluorescent Expression from Engineered Biological Constructs in E. coli , 2016, PloS one.

[4]  Christopher A. Voigt,et al.  Ribozyme-based insulator parts buffer synthetic circuits from genetic context , 2012, Nature Biotechnology.

[5]  Jacob Beal,et al.  Signal-to-Noise Ratio Measures Efficacy of Biological Computing Devices and Circuits , 2015, Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol..

[6]  D. Endy.  Foundations for engineering biology , 2005, Nature.

[7]  Junaid Kashir,et al.  Biology is technology: the promise, peril, and new business of engineering life , 2012 .

[8]  Jacob Beal,et al.  CIDAR MoClo: Improved MoClo Assembly Standard and New E. coli Part Library Enable Rapid Combinatorial Design for Synthetic and Traditional Biology. , 2016, ACS synthetic biology.

[9]  Christopher A. Voigt,et al.  Genetic circuit design automation , 2016, Science.

[10]  R. Weiss,et al.  CRISPR transcriptional repression devices and layered circuits in mammalian cells , 2014, Nature Methods.

[11]  Ernst Weber,et al.  A Modular Cloning System for Standardized Assembly of Multigene Constructs , 2011, PloS one.

[12]  Domitilla Del Vecchio,et al.  Retroactivity Attenuation in Bio-Molecular Systems Based on Timescale Separation , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[13]  Swapnil Bhatia,et al.  A single-layer platform for Boolean logic and arithmetic through DNA excision in mammalian cells , 2017, Nature Biotechnology.

[14]  Jacob Beal,et al.  Reducing DNA context dependence in bacterial promoters , 2017, PloS one.