Introduction

The Circuit Registry (Mind Road) is a collection of genetic circuits designed and published in either peer-reviewed journals or iGEM competition. We realized that there is no website or database that has systematically record all existing synthetic biology projects. Inspired by the Registry of Standard Biological Part database, we came up with an ambitious plan that we should make the Registry of Standard Genetic Circuit. Our goal is to collect all previous iGEM projects and all published synthetic biology projects. The documentation of genetic circuits follows the general principle of biobrick foundation: Standardization, all description of genetic circuits should adopt the same format.

Mind Road is the visualization interface of circuit registry. All the circuits that have successfully submitted can be found there. This web application aims at assisting people to find the synthetic biological projects they are interested in. We build up the Mind Road network through scanning for over a hundred of projects that designed and functioned (partially) the genetic circuits as well as simulating a brainstorm so as to establish the Mind Road more practical and realistic.

Database

All the data is stored in our MySQL server database. In order to dynamically update data in a safer way, we choose MyISAM to be the engine of our database. The synthetic biological projects in Mind Road is classified level by level. All the classification is listed in the end of this page:

We try to establish a technique standard for the data structure. A complete project on Biomiao must contain following essential information:

Part-I: Basic information

Project name, Author(s), Year, Wiki (paper) –Link, Description [Around 150 words], Project result [representative diagram or some other images (enclosed in the annex)], Reference [Write all the relative papers you’ve referenced].

Part-II: Genetic Circuit information

Circuit description [How your circuit works and what are the subunits (promoter, operon, RBS, coding, domain, terminator…) of this circuit, Circuit diagram [enclosed in the annex], Subparts information: [Give us a brief description about the parts you designed or used in this project like the Biobrick ID, the subparts (if have), the functions)].

Part-III: Lab process / Major methods

Equipment [List the machines or devices you used while processing the experiment], Material [List all the medium (each component should be listed out), strains & plasmids you have used in the experiment], Procedure [List the procedures as simple as possible in order. Or you can just write some key processes (or methods) of your experiments].

The information that mention above is also the submit format. You can go to the submit page to upload your projects.

We understand that there are many unfunctional biobrick parts and device uploaded to partsregistry database, and it is a big issue to identify these really working circuits. To avoid this situation in our system, we developed an evaluation system and classified all projects into three categories:

1. 3 stars-- The circuit is reported to be functional in peer-reviewed journals.
2. 2 stars-- The circuit is reported by one iGEM team and independently successfully reproduced by another iGEM team
3. 1 star -- The circuit is reported by one iGEM team

Results

So far, we’ve uploaded the information approximately 80 projects. Most projects are coming from previous iGEM team. And we’ve invited some 2013 iGEM teams to submit their projects on the Biomiao platform and received active response from Peking, Shenzhen-BGI, SYSU, XMU, HKUST, and other teams. We eagerly expect all the 2013 iGEMers to join in this platform and share their projects. We are now still sending more and more invitation Email to the 2013 iGEM teams.

Introduction about the Circuit List

The Circuit List is another way to present all the projects to user. In this way, the user can directly check all the project in a list