Saturday, September 26, 2009

O Brave New World That Has Such Bacteria In It

The BioBricks Foundation (BBF) has Request For Comments (RFCs), just like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They have a BioBrick language, a graphical language, and are working on an RDF-based framework for a synthetic biology ontology. (The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a standard for the semantic web.)

BBF is using this this computer science technology and organizational structure to create "standard biological parts" that "encode basic biological functions". The goal is to enable biological engineers to "program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer".

(Hat Tip to Michael Specter's New Yorker 28 September 2009 article.)

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