Every scientific discipline develops standards for publishing that are designed to help researchers succinctly communicate evidence supporting their conclusions and allow others to build upon their work. For example, to publish the first report of a new compound, synthetic chemists must supply NMR and mass spectra because there is a broad consensus that these analytical techniques are necessary to show that a compound was prepared as intended. Similarly, when new software is developed, it is nearly universally required that the source code be made available upon publication so others can check its function and reuse it.

Some practices are holdovers from when engineered DNA was constructed by copying and pasting together parts of existing DNA sequences and it was expensive, difficult, or even impossible to check the results. However, sequencing technologies have now improved to the point that determining the entire nucleotide sequences of plasmids and even genomes is becoming inexpensive and widely accessible. In 2023, sequencing an entire plasmid costs $15 and sequencing a bacterial genome costs $100, and these prices are likely to fall. Unlike computer code, DNA can mutate, accumulating changes in its sequence when it is copied by enzymes or cells. This possibility of unintentional evolution makes it especially important to verify DNA sequences being used in a study, even if they are not newly constructed.

DNA synthesis technologies are also improving. It is increasingly becoming possible and affordable to order plasmids and large pieces of DNA that are constructed from scratch. We are moving toward an era in which most new DNA constructs will be made on demand by biomanufacturing companies, rather than painstakingly assembled from existing pieces by the researchers who designed them. These changes negate the utility of describing the assembly process in a publication, since DNA will function the same way no matter how it is made.

Our standards require that authors report the entire sequence of every DNA construct used in their experiments. Even if they consider some portions, such as a plasmid backbone, less important or relevant, the full sequence must be provided. Complete reporting avoids tedious reference tracking and/or guesswork to reconstruct sequences, eliminates ambiguities, and ensures that researchers have validated their materials. Combinatorial libraries that include many sequences can be exemplified by a representative sequence plus enough information that any individual member can be unambiguously reconstructed. Although we recommend the routine use of whole-genome sequencing to characterize modified cells or organisms, we recognize this remains somewhat costly and demanding. At a minimum, sequences must be reported for engineered regions of newly modified genomes.

Ideally, all DNA sequences reported in a study will be fully supported by empirical sequencing data. Regardless of how much validation was performed, we propose that authors be required to clearly document what portions of their sequences were verified and how. For example, if certain fragments generated by restriction enzyme digest of a part plasmid were not re-sequenced after assembly, this would be explicitly stated and/or annotated in the provided files. Although this reporting standard is more demanding than conventional practices, little elaboration is needed if all bases are verified empirically, such as by whole-plasmid sequencing. Blanket statements such as “all constructs were verified by Sanger sequencing” are not sufficiently specific.

We call for universal adoption of the GenBank file format for reporting DNA sequences. Though not preferred, because it only supports sequences and cannot include annotations, we would also allow the simpler FASTA file format. These are both established and widely used formats that are compatible with essentially all software tools and databases. All DNA sequences should be provided in one or more Supplementary Data archive files. Sequences should never be provided solely in the form of figures, spreadsheets, word processing documents, or PDF files, which provide less information and reuse value than machine-readable text file formats.

Accurate and meaningful annotation of functional DNA sequences, both natural and engineered, is challenging. Therefore, there is considerable value in publishing sequences with annotations curated by experts. Authors should be encouraged to include their annotations in published sequences. Annotations capture what they noted and recognized about their DNA materials and can inform interpretation of results, as well as reuse of genetic parts and modules. These annotations are often available without much additional effort and may provide useful training data for machine learning or other automated approaches for improving annotation pipelines.

Modern biotechnology studies often involve cloning hundreds of bespoke constructs and increasingly employ direct synthesis of large DNA fragments. Each laboratory favors its own subset of an enormous diversity of effective assembly techniques and an increasing variety of commercial sources of synthetic DNA. Unless a paper is reporting new DNA synthesis or assembly methods, detailed descriptions of how these steps were performed by the authors are unnecessary, as well as laborious to write, difficult to read, and unlikely to be useful to others in the future. Any potential utility of this information is obscured by the narrative text format. Reporting tables of primer sequences used exclusively for DNA assembly should also be optional. Information sharing is better addressed through providing full DNA sequences in machine-readable formats.