Biological parts

What could be more fun than playing with Lego? Playing with Living Lego.

At the Registry of standard biological parts you will find a wiki that documents various biological parts. These components can be used together to build up more complex structures, or genetically engineered machines. OpenWetWare.org tells us to think of DNA as a low-level programming language and the genome as a program. Just as programming languages provide libraries of routines for developers to use, so the idea of making libraries of biological parts, or BioBricks, exisits to allow people to share and use constructions that exhibit some, hopefully, well defined behaviour.

Some examples that are mentioned, are making a yeast cell that counts to three and then turns red, or making a bacterial cell that expresses lots of human insulin. See, told you it would more interesting than Lego. Of course trying to debug your creation may be bit of a sticky problem.

And if you like a challenge, you can always try and participate in the iGEM Synthetic Biology competition.