The Institute of Biological Engineering (IBE) brings together a community of scientists and engineers to address global challenges in the environment, resources, energy, health, and sustainability through engineering analysis and design. The 17th Annual meeting of the IBE took place this weekend in Indianapolis, with a focus on timely themes including Ecological Engineering, Biosensors, BioNanotechnology, Biomedical Engineering, Systems Engineering and Bioenergy.

A high point of the meeting was the award of the article of the year from the official journal of the IBE, Journal of Biological Engineering. Editor-in-Chief, Mark Eiteman, recognized one of the most highly accessed articles in the journal, during 2011: "Engineering BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts" by Reshma P Shetty and colleagues. This Methodology extends the utility of the BioBrick Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a resource that promotes sharing of nucleic acid sequence “parts” (encoding a definable biological function) amongst synthetic biologists. The work by Shetty and colleagues builds upon the existing BioBricks Registry to include a collection of standardized vectors using the BioBrick parts. The article was accessed 5,730 times during 2011 and has been accessed 20,188 times since publication. Moreover, the article has been cited 117 times (Google Scholar).

Many congratulations to the authors on the occasion of their IBE award. The impressive readership and citation of their work illustrates a major contribution to the advancement of synthetic biology.