During iGEM we have got into the habit of using special scientific terms of the “language” of synthetic biology which are not self-explanatory. But for those who do not have a biological background or want to explore an unfamiliar area, a glossary of all these terms is shown below.

Non canonical amino acid
In biochemistry, non-canonical, non-coded, non-proteinogenic, or "unnatural" amino acids are those not naturally encoded or found in the genetic code of any organisms. Naturally, an organism could encode for 20 amino acids.

4,5-dimethoxy-2-nitrobenzylserine (DMNBS)
Serine with O-nitrobenzyl protection group, a non-canonical amino acid (“caged” serine).

Ortho-nitrobenzyl tyrosine (ONBY)
Tyrosine with O-nitrobenzyl protection group, a non-canonical amino acid (“Caged” tyrosine).

They are used in the process of photo-caging with its corresponding orthogonal tRNA/synthetase pair.

Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase
An aminoacyl tRNA synthetase (aaRS) is an enzyme that attaches the appropriate amino acid onto its tRNA. It does so by catalysing the esterification of a specific amino acid or its precursor to one of all its compatible equivalent tRNAs to form an aminoacyl-tRNA.

BioBrick
BioBrick standard biological parts are DNA sequences of defined structure and function; These building blocks are used to design and assemble larger synthetic biological circuits from individual parts and combinations of parts with defined functions, which would then be incorporated into living cells such as Escherichia coli cells to construct new biological systems. They represent an effort to introduce the engineering principles of abstraction and standardization into synthetic biology. Examples of BioBrick parts include promoters, ribosomal binding sites (RBS), coding sequences and terminators.

Codon optimization
The vast majority of amino acids are encoded by multiple codons, which means that there are multiple tRNAs that carry any given amino acid. Of any group of "redundant" tRNAs, one is usually much more abundant. Codon optimization is switching the codons used in a transgene without changing the amino acid that it encodes for -- this typically dramatically increases the abundance of the protein, which is encoded by the codon optimized gene; because it replaces “rare” with abundant codons.