Synthetic biology can be defined as a methodological approach for the rationale or forward engineering of biological systems for useful purposes. As any rationale or forward design framework, synthetic biology strongly depends on the availability of standard procedures for executing experiments and on collection data and reference materials for building calibration curves and quality controls.

The rationale behind is to use standard operating procedures and reference materials to ensure that collected data can be exchanged and compared among different laboratories using different types of equipment at different times. Data collection and rescaling is of paramount importance, in order to make data directly comparable across different operators/labs/equipment. In turn, data exchange and comparison are at the foundation of any forward engineering approach that relies on community-generated data to promote non-incremental innovation.

Despite the centrality of these issues, synthetic biology is lagging with respect to other engineering disciplines when it comes to an established and recognized standardization framework. Within this framework, the MIAMI project intends to adopt internally and promote externally a standardization framework for the in vivo characterization of DNA parts. MIAMI’s attempt falls within the broader perspective of standardization in synthetic biology, for this reason, MIAMI’s strategy was elaborated and reviewed in close cooperation with BioRoboost (Grant nr. N820699) and Syn4Flav (Grant nr. 814650) EU projects and SBOL commission and iGEM community.

MIAMI contribution to DNA parts standardization is a set of Processes presented as a schematic workflow divided into tasks, further detailed into SOPs. Whenever possible, reference materials for the construction of calibration curves and execution of QC are provided in the SOP’s description.

Standard operating procedure framework will be updated periodically, thus if you have any suggestion please get in touch with MIAMI’s quality manager Ada Serena Marletta s.marletta at explora-biotech dot com.