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Review
. 2012;7(8):e43231.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043231. Epub 2012 Aug 15.

The PLOS ONE synthetic biology collection: six years and counting

Jean Peccoud  1 , Mark Isalan
Affiliations
Review

The PLOS ONE synthetic biology collection: six years and counting

Jean Peccoud et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

Since it was launched in 2006, PLOS ONE has published over fifty articles illustrating the many facets of the emerging field of synthetic biology. This article reviews these publications by organizing them into broad categories focused on DNA synthesis and assembly techniques, the development of libraries of biological parts, the use of synthetic biology in protein engineering applications, and the engineering of gene regulatory networks and metabolic pathways. Finally, we review articles that describe enabling technologies such as software and modeling, along with new instrumentation. In order to increase the visibility of this body of work, the papers have been assembled into the PLOS ONE Synthetic Biology Collection (www.ploscollections.org/synbio). Many of the innovative features of the PLOS ONE web site will help make this collection a resource that will support a lively dialogue between readers and authors of PLOS ONE synthetic biology papers. The content of the collection will be updated periodically by including relevant articles as they are published by the journal. Thus, we hope that this collection will continue to meet the publishing needs of the synthetic biology community.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Historical distribution of synthetic biology articles published by PLOS ONE.
This figure reports the number of articles in the collection published between 2006 and 2011. It shows a rapid growth of synthetic biology that reflects the growth of the journal and the increased familiarity of synthetic biologists with PLOS ONE.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Relationships between article-level metrics.
For articles published between 2006 and 2009, there is a positive correlation between the number of times an article is cited in the scientific literature and the number of times it is viewed (A). For articles published between 2010 and 2012, there is a positive relationship between the number of views and the number of citations in the Mendeley social network (B). Metrics, such as number of views and citations in social media, give readers and authors an estimate of the scientific impact of individual articles well before they receive citations in scientific literature.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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