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 essential. To this end, we have extended the Inventory of Composable Elements (ICE), an open-source web based platform for managing information about synthetic biological parts, to include the ability to efficiently share these elements in a distributed manner. 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 across labs in the synthetic biology research community and 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). Also, through the REST API, information in ICE can be accessed using a web browser or through third party BioCAD tools. Support for multiple data formats (e.g. Genbank, Fasta and the Synthetic Biology Open Language) also opens up the data and platform to these higher level synthetic biology design tools. These third party tools can also access the shared data in the “web of registries” through the available APIs.