If you haven’t visited the Registry of Standard Biological Parts lately, you should stop by and take a look. We’ve been helping out in the re-design and re-organization of the parts collection available there. Randy and Meagan are constantly looking to improve the Registry so that it is more useful to iGEM teams and academic labs. After a fair bit of consideration, this year we’ve deliberately tried to make the Registry easier to browse for newcomers. The basic idea was to try to make the Registry look more like a catalog. Thus, if you visit the Registry catalog of parts, you can browse parts and devices by type, by assembly standard, by function, by contributor, or by chassis.

For each group of parts, we’ve added text and pictures to better explain why and how you’d want to use those parts in larger systems. For example, there have long been a number of plasmid backbones available from the Registry. Depending on whether you want to assemble parts together, operate a multi-component synthetic system, express a protein or measure the behavior of a part, you might choose to use a different plasmid backbone. By visiting the plasmid backbones page, you can find all of these backbones organized and linked from one place.

The Registry is always a work in progress, so stay tuned for even more changes coming soon. And of course, we’d welcome your feedback. So take a look and let us know what you think!

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