Raising the Standards

Drew Endy's lab has an article in Nature Biotechnology describing how they developed a framework to define and describe engineered biological devices that they then applied to an engineered, genetically encoded cell-cell communication receiver, called BBa_F2620. The framework they use is adapted from existing ones for engineered devices -- there are, they say, biological equivalents to sensors, logic gates, and actuators. The datasheet on BBa_F2620 reports its static performance, compatibility, and reliability, among other characteristics. "The characterization of BBa_F2620 sets up perhaps the first nearly complete standard to which future attempts can be compared," writes the University of California, Berkeley's Adam Arkin in a related News and Views.