ICE: A Distributed and Interconnected Biological Part Registry

Advances in synthetic biology research and genetic design automation, along with the availability of rapid and reliable DNA sequencing has resulted in a steady increase in the number of complex engineered biological devices. Maintaining information about the constituent parts of these devices, along with the ability to share them with other members in the synthetic biology community as well-characterized components with the goal of reusability is a challenge that is not fully addressed by any of the existing registry software platforms.

We have developed an open-source web-based platform for synthetic biology information management known as the Inventory of Composable Elements (ICE). It includes a distributed software platform to enable efficient sharing of biological elements across labs in the synthetic biology research community. Referred to as “Web of Registries”, this feature aims to increase the efficiency of bioengineering by enabling scientists to publish and share datasets across multiple ICE installations in potentially different geographic locations. Thus, users from one ICE instance (e.g. the JBEI public repository) can query and access parts, sequences, strains and Arabidopsis seeds of interest stored in other connected ICE instances (e.g. the Synberc repository). ICE also integrates browser-based tools such as VectorEditor and PigeonCAD for sequence annotation, manipulation, analysis and visualization. Support for data formats such as GenBank, FASTA and the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL), ensures compatibility with existing and emerging tools for synthetic biologists.