Synthetic Biology Curation Tools (SYNBICT)

Much progress has been made in developing tools to generate component-based design representations of biological systems from standard libraries of parts. Most biological designs, however, are still specified at the sequence level. Consequently, there exists a need for a tool that can be used to automatically infer component-based design representations from sequences, particularly in cases when those sequences have minimal levels of annotation. Such a tool would assist computational synthetic biologists in bridging the gap between the outputs of sequence editors and the inputs to more sophisticated design tools, and it would facilitate their development of automated workflows for design curation and quality control. Accordingly, we introduce Synthetic Biology Curation Tools (SYNBICT), a Python tool suite for automation-assisted annotation, curation, and functional inference for genetic designs. We have validated SYNBICT by applying it to genetic designs in the DARPA Synergistic Discovery & Design (SD2) program and the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) 2018 distribution. Most notably, SYNBICT is more automated and parallelizable than manual design editors, and it can be applied to interpret existing designs instead of only generating new ones.