The BioBricks Foundation:Standards/Technical/Exchange/Core Data Model

Overview

The core data model covers the low-level description of DNA constructs. The definition of a "Part" is at the heart of the model. Parts can be combined with Vectors (which are a sub-class of Part) into the description of a full DNA molecule (for example a complete plasmid). This DNA molecule can then be associated with a DNA- or cell-stock sample. Note, the image is not showing all data fields of every class.

Definitions

Part

A part is a building block for synthetic biology. At the moment, we are mostly concerned with the DNA-level description. DNA parts MUST map to a continuous stretch of DNA. Multiple disconnected segments have to be broken up into separate parts.

Informally, a part can be either "basic" or "composite". The sequence of composite parts is a concatenation of smaller sub-Parts -- often with intervening "scar" sequences from assembly reactions. However, we do not define special sub-classes for basic and composite parts. Whenever available, the sub-part composition should be described in addition to the plain text sequence.

We later also want to represent RNA or protein parts and we need to represent the relations between them. For example, several different DNA parts may translate to the same protein part. How we exactly do this remains a matter of discussion. My (Raik's) suggestion is to introduce different "Description levels" (i.e. sub-classes of parts) and allow multiple inheritance between part objects. For example, a part with the beta-lactamase DNA sequence would be of "Type" DnaPart (description level) and would be the child (inheritance) of a ProteinPart that describes the amino acid sequence, structure and activity of this beta-lactamase enzyme.