Fig 2. Most genetic part variants are found in plasmids from 1 or 2 labs.

(A) Total number of unique variants found in one or two depositing labs (1–2) versus variants found in three or more depositing labs (≥3). (B) All unique genetic part variants plotted by how many times they were observed versus the number of labs that deposited a plasmid with that variant. The blue horizontal line at 20 labs is the minimum threshold we used for selecting variants that were widespread. The orange vertical line at 1205 variant observations is the cutoff above which we did not perform the authorship analysis to find cases of convergent evolution or engineering.