Endy:Measkit PLO

Introduction

1. Engineering many-component systems is made easier by developing collections of standard parts.
2. It is easier still to predict the behavior of engineered biological systems assembled from standard parts if the component parts themselves were well characterized.
3. Measurement of physical objects is well understood and has been successful developed and applied in other domains (e.g., principle of correlation, et cetera)
4. Measuring biological parts consistently has proven challenging, and may be unlike past experiences (due to...)
   • Due to the sensitivity and unpredictability of part performance to measurement conditions (e.g. cell strain)
5. Still, can frame measurement problem in context of impact of variation in instruments and conditions, which allows for (state three cases).
6. Thus, to try these ideas out / begin to make progress, we designed reference standards for promoters and RBSs, and developed models, that taken together allow for (accounting of some sorts of variation).
7. We did the following (i) used a reference standard to evaluate variation in conditions and instruments ourselves, and (ii) distributed a reference kit to validate the approach across multiple labs.
8. Taken together we demonstrated the utility of the reference standards (prefatory summary here).

Discussion

1. Reference standards are good because allows for a consistent framework in which to collect data that will support (first) empirical models regarding how activity of promoters and RBSs varies across conditions.
2. Reference standards are also good because theory of biological engineering not yet developed, and an auto-scaling / relative measurement may be more useful for many applications.
   • make use of counter example of importance of OFF being OFF, for some applications