POLICY & PRACTICE

While designing and making our new microfluidic chips, the team realized that it would be a great addition to the registry to have a catalog of Microfluidic Parts similar to the existing DNA Parts Catalog. The chips also have basic, intermediate and composite structures that can be combined and reused in a way resembling building blocks.

Creating a database of these parts would contribute to the already enormous library of DNA parts, and would moreover give a push forward to all the teams contemplating the integration of microfluidics in their projects.

As such a structure isn’t available, we created one similar in structure to the existing one, so as to easily integrate it in the system, maintaining a certain uniformity, which would make it natural after having had contact with the existing catalogs (biobricks, plasmid backbones, chassis...). We kept in mind that the registry will develop itself, just as chip designs will integrate new parts, so we designed a naming system that can grow both horizontally (adding types of parts) and vertically (adding sub-parts).

Enlarging project possibilities

iGEM projects are evolving into much more complex and ‘important innovative/crazy/risky’ questions, more organisms types are used, different technologies (such as microfluidic chips, computers, …).

It is important to say, related to our safety work (link here), that the use of microfluidic chips decreases the risk with genetically modified cells, as these are contained in a stable & in a way, isolated environment. This is useful for the future development of iGEM, because as projects become more complex and innovative/crazy/risky and start contemplating more complex questions, more organisms are used, and the usage of microfluidic chips will certainly develop the use of level 2 organisms, which are interesting in a different way that level 1 orgs. This will bring a surge of new ideas, which were difficult to contemplate because of the safety principles, because a wide range of currently unsafe experiences/organisms will become [safe enough to use]

Structure of the Microfluidic Parts Registry

To maintain a uniform structure of reusable parts throughout the whole registry, the system was designed in the following way, where each white box represents each type of reusable microfluidic brick, and the red arrows represent links from one to the other.

Naming the parts

The microfluidic parts would be named similarly to the DNA BioBricks: