Mac Cowell and I have been working on a new project, coined Bricklet. Bricklet is an open and extensible platform for storing and sharing standardized synthetic biology parts with the goal of fostering a rich ecosystem of synthetic biology software.

Bricklet currently consists of:

• A proposal for a Part Description Language
• A proposal for a Parts Sharing Framework that supports a web of registries, selective publication, document revisioning, and provenance/attribution.

Our intent is to implement ideas from the synthetic biology community and the BioBricks Technical Standards Working Group. We want to exercise these ideas with the hope of gaining insight into both their advantages and limits, with the intent to iterate in the future. Eventually, we may like to submit our ideas as patches to a project like Brickit to reuse existing functionality and build development mindshare.

We are tracking the requirements, design, and implementation on the Bricklet page at Google Code page. Mac and I will be presenting our progress at the Standards and Specifications in Synthetic Biology Workshop at the end of this month.