Research

What Is a Design Article?

Synthetic biology is about taking a top-down approach to engineering biological systems that serve a social or environmental problem. Successful synthetic biology projects generally start by considering what the solution is going to look like on the system, device, and part levels. Design Articles provide opportunities for teams to carefully consider and describe each of these project components before beginning their lab work.
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Title of Manuscript:

Should concisely summarize the paper and any significant conclusions– don't worry about making it pretty, as long as it speaks to your topic precisely that's what matters

Authors:

Accompanied by comma-delimited names of authors that should be listed in alphabetical order by last name

Mentors:

In partnership with BioBuilder, the club has unlimited resources to graduate, and doctorate mentors who are experienced in synthetic biology and will be assisting your groups questions and research
Accompanied comma-delimited names of teachers (Mrs. L'Ecuyer, and any others) and mentors should be listed in alphabetical order by last name. Also place an asterisks after the mentor’s name who will serve as the primary contact for the team.

Affiliations:

Provide a comma-delimited list of the organizations with which the authors are affiliated. In most cases the Affiliations section will simply be the name of the school that you attend.

Abstract:

An abstract should summarize your article in less than 300 words by briefly touching on the key points covered in the background, methods, results, conclusions sections of research papers. If you need help, there are a plethora (millions) of examples on the NCBI, NIH, Nature to look at and gain an understanding. Similarly, the abstract for design, methods, and perspectives papers should summarize the content addressed in each of its major sections.

Video:

Each manuscript should be accompanied by a short video in which the authors briefly describe the motivations, methodologies, and results of their project. The video is intended to give conference attendees and prospective readers a brief overview of the student project and encourage them to read the article. This section of the manuscript will provide a link to the video, which will be posted on Breezio.

Keywords:

List 3-5 comma-delimited words or phrases that will help locate the article in a search.

Background:

The background section describes the experimental objectives and why they are important. This section will generally start by describing the big problem that the researchers are trying to solve, how they plan to go about doing this, and how the current experiment will support this process. Remember to cite all sources of information used here or elsewhere in the paper. See the Reference section for more details.

Systems Level:

Design Papers should contain a section which describes the team’s solution in the context of the complete biological system. This section deals with how the system works as a whole.

Device Level:

In Design Papers, the Device Level section addresses the key functional components of the system. Devices would include the engineered organisms and any functional pathways that are required for these organisms to perform their jobs.

Parts Level:

The Parts Level section of a Design Paper shows how specific genetic components are to be combined to make the functional operons pathways described in the previous section.

Safety:

Design Papers should also include a brief discussion about how the proposed system will be safely constructed, tested, and employed to avoid harm to the developers, users, community, and environment.

Discussions:

In Research Papers, the Discussions section gives the authors an opportunity to summarize their experimental results and describe how they met or failed to meet study objectives. In a Research Paper, the Discussions section should conclude with a consideration of what additional experiments will need to be performed to carry the project forward. When written for a Methods Paper, the Discussions section should be used to summarize advantages and shortcomings of the method and suggest ways for improving the process.

Acknowledgements:

This section generally consists of one or two brief paragraphs which recognize individuals and organizations who made the reported study possible through the contribution of knowledge, insights, or material resources.

References:

This section consists of a formatted list of all publications referenced elsewhere in the article. The citations are referenced throughout the text and listed in this section according to the standards set out in Citing Medicine, 2nd edition: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers.

Featured Image:

Authors are invited to submit a high resolution graphic which highlights the main point of their paper and can be displayed alongside the title in the journal’s table of contents. Featured images provide an important way to attract a reader’s interest in your article.

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