The Minimum Information Standard for Engineered Organism Experiments (MIEO) identifies experimental factors that affect the growth and productivity of engineered organisms in small-scale experiments. MIEO enables reproducible performance of engineered organisms and parts across space, time, and conditions of use. MIEO should accelerate the exchange of organisms within and across organizations, enable reproducibility of published results, and mitigate inconsistent performance within a laboratory.

A draft of the standard is available here. We encourage comments to this document, as our goal is to establish a community-supported, bottom-up standard. If you would like to be included as a contributor in the development of this standard, please leave your name on the contributors list at the end of the document. Thank you for your participation.

This standard will focus on experimental factors that affect the growth and productivity of engineered organisms. The factors that affect cell growth and productivity can be grouped into three broad categories: (1) media composition, including the identity and amount of media components; (2) geometry and shaking of the growth container; and (3) other factors, including time, environment, selective agents and inoculum. The list of factors in these groups can be found in the description of the standard and table of factors in the Google document.

We published a paper describing this work: “A minimum information standard for reproducing bench-scale bacterial cell growth and productivity”.