PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Jonathan Tellechea-Luzardo AU - Paweł Widera AU - Victor de Lorenzo AU - Natalio Krasnogor TI - Linking Engineered Cells to Their Digital Twins: a Version Control System for Strain Engineering AID - 10.1101/786111 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 786111 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/30/786111.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/30/786111.full AB - As DNA sequencing and synthesis become cheaper and more easily accessible, the scale and complexity of biological engineering projects is set to grow. Yet, although there is an accelerating convergence between biotechnology and computing science, a deficit in software and laboratory techniques diminishes the ability to make biotechnology more agile, reproducible and transparent while, at the same time, limiting the security and safety of synthetic biology constructs. To partially address some of these problems, this paper presents an approach for physically linking engineered cells to their digital footprint - we called it digital twinning. This enables the tracking of the entire engineering history of a cell line in a specialised version control system for collaborative strain engineering.