Comment

SB4.0 - Ready for takeoff

Kim de Mora concludes from this year's conference that the synthetic biology community is reaching critical mass.

My experience of SB 4.0 almost felt like that of an external observer of the field. I've been involved in Synthetic Biology since participating in the iGEM competition in 2006, but this was my first SB conference. I had attended BioSysBio in 2007 and the BioBricks foundation meetings after iGEM in 2007, but SB 4.0 was just on another scale.

My impression is that Synthetic Biology truly now has the critical mass to move from a more ideological movement to a recognized academic discipline upon which departments and careers can be founded.

One point of interest at the conference was that Drew Endy mentioned our 2006 iGEM project (development of an arsenic biosensor) in a plenary session as an example of the direction synthetic biology should take. Even two years later, our project is still in people's minds.

There was a session on experimental standardization, and the topics discussed included short talks on the current assembly standards,
promoter measurement standards and measurement standards in yeast. The speakers were Jason Kelly, J. Chris Anderson and Myself. Jason discussed how distributed researchers can make standard measurements of biological parts in reference to a collaboration paper that we have coming out early next year. J. Chris Anderson talked about the creation and implementation of a roadmap for quantitative standards.

I gave a talk on my experiences designing an experimental setup to measure promoter strength in S. cerevisiae. I presented my preliminary flow cytometry data and got some good feedback on how to improve my measurement techniques and experiments. In the session on standard regulation, the BB_1.0 standard was discussed, but the outcome was a circular discussion on the difficulties of suggesting a new standard. The outcome was that a new format for discussing standards was needed.

A format has been decided on in the meetings since the 2008 iGEM competition. A request for comment (RFC) system has been implemented so that people can propose standards and track comments. RFC 0 was compiled as a list of instructions on how to
correctly write RFC's and it can be found here:
http://bbf.openwetware.org/RFC.html.