The BioBrick Assembly Kit includes all the reagents needed to assemble BioBrick standard biological parts.
A biological part is a nucleic acid sequence that encodes a definable biological function, such as a promoter, ribosome binding site, protein coding sequence, or terminator.
BioBrick parts are standardized biological parts that adhere to one or more of the open BioBrick standards, including the first physical assembly standard published by Tom Knight in 2003. The BioBrick Assembly Kit contains the reagents needed for the Knight assembly standard (BBF RFC 10) and other standards that use the same restriction enzymes.
The key innovation of the BioBrick assembly standard is that a biological engineer can assemble any two BioBrick parts, and the resulting composite object is itself a BioBrick part that can be combined with any other BioBrick parts. This feature has two fundamental advantages. First, the BioBrick assembly standard enables the distributed production of a collection of compatible biological parts. Two engineers in different parts of the world who have never interacted can each design a part that conforms to the BioBrick assembly standard, and those two parts will be physically composable via the standard. Second, since engineers carry out the exact same operation every time that they want to combine two BioBrick parts, the assembly process is amenable to optimization and automation, in contrast to more traditional ad hoc molecular cloning approaches.
Many people ask why they should use the BioBrick standard. There are two reasons. First, if you're interested in building multi-gene systems, then BioBrick assembly tends to be significantly faster than ad hoc cloning approaches. Second, if you want to share and reuse parts with the synthetic biology community, then the BioBrick standard tends to be in more common use.
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Still have questions. Check out the references below and Ginkgo's support pages.
Knight, T.F. Idempotent Vector Design for Standard Assembly of BioBricks. MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group Technical Report (2003).
Shetty, R.P., Endy, D., Knight, T.F. Engineering BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts. J Biol Eng 2:5 (2008).
Canton, B., Labno, A., Endy, D. Refinement and standardization of synthetic biological parts and devices. Nat Biotechnol 26:787-93 (2008).