Inventory of Composable Elements (ICE): Web of Registries

Advances in synthetic biology and biological design automation have led to ever increasing numbers of complex biological designs. With the rapid emergence of new biological designs comes the challenge of maintaining accurate and up-to-date databases describing the designs and their constituent components. We have extended the Inventory of Composable Elements (ICE), an open-source web-based platform for managing and sharing information about microbial strains, DNA/protein sequences, and plant seeds, with “Web of Registries” functionality. This new functionality enables scientists to share datasets across multiple ICE installations. Users from within one ICE installation (e.g., the JBEI public repository) can query and access strains, sequences, and seeds stored in other ICE installations (e.g., the JGI or Agile BioFoundry repositories). “Web of Registries” shared data (supporting GenBank, FASTA, and SBOL data exchange standards) can be accessed online, or programmatically accessed by third party software tools via a RESTful API.