Fig 2. Most genetic part variants are found in plasmids from one or two labs, but some are more widespread.

(A) Total number of distinct variant sequences found in plasmids from one or two depositing labs (1–2) versus found in plasmids from three or more depositing labs (≥3). (B) All 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 1,205 variant observations is the cutoff above which we did not perform the authorship analysis to find cases of convergent evolution or engineering.