Talk:BioBrick

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Hello, I am a final year university student(studying Biochemistry) and I plan on editing and adding to this page. Shammie23 (talk) 19:13, 10 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi!

Recently I stumbled upon this blog: http://brokenscience.com/ The article within that struck me was:

Biobrick’s. What the fuck are biobricks? http://brokenscience.com/2008/06/17/biobricks-what-the-fuck-are-biobricks/

In the article, the author argues that, "Biobricks [...] sounds like a good idea, after all, other engineering disciplines have parts (transistor, nut, bolt, chip). But biology doesn’t work that way. The metaphor fails because biology is ultimately, not standardizable. Unless you’re dealing with a very short segment of DNA, such as a terminator (end code) or promoter (start code) you never reuse parts. You need a unique solution most every time. You need print on demand for DNA. You need DNA synthesis. [...]"

I am totally mesmerized by synthetic biology. This is the first time I stumbled upon criticism on the net from within the scientific community.

So my question is this: is this source enough to add "Critisicm - Technical" to the article?

If you agree, I would present the text shortly.

2008-07-29 - Guest

I disagree. The brokenscience blog reads like a bunch of unsubstantiated slander. The (typically anonymous or cryptically signed) postings on this blog appear to contain obvious falsehoods that are easily documented as such. Writing of this sort is the opposite of what any reasonable person would consider thoughtful scientific or engineering research criticism (e.g., brokenscience should post an entry on how brokenscience is itself broken). Moreover, the person running brokenscience blog is known to be upset at Drew Endy and his recent PhD graduates, many of whom are leaders with the BioBricks effort, because they kicked an earlier version of his brokenscience blog off from being hosted on OpenWetWare because all his posts were destructive attacks on researchers and the research community. Meanwhile, and more importantly to your question, the BioBricks parts effort is a first attempt at standardizing genetic functions; it would be very surprising if such a project was not incredibly difficult. Along the lines, several important peer-reviewed research articles describing BioBrick parts have been published recently. For example, Nature Biotechnology just published this substantial research article by Dr. Barry Canton from Drew Endy's lab at MIT detailing BioBrick BBa_F2620, and also describing how to build better BioBrick parts. Canton et al's article was subjected to a detailed commentary authored by Professor Adam Arkin of UC Berkeley. As a second example, Dr. Reshma Shetty from Drew Endy's and Tom Knight's labs published a paper on constructing DNA vectors using BioBrick parts; Shetty et al. article is a "highly accessed" article at the Journal of Biological Engineering. There's no mention of any of these articles either on the Wikipedia entry for BioBrick or on the brokenscience blog.

The words BioBrick and BioBricks are used as adjectives, not nouns, by the technical research community. The correct usage is "BioBrick part", not a "BioBrick." Moreover, the BioBricks Foundation appears to have trademarked the uses of these terms and supports updates to their definition via an open standards setting process. See here for more information.