Two meetings in the Bay Area have taken a fresh look at the role of computerized automation in the design of biological systems. The first meeting, which took place on July 26 at Stanford and was sponsored by the BioBricks Foundation, was intended to further develop a data and information exchange standard(s) supporting synthetic biology. The workgroup’s ambitious goals included developing an initial schema for describing standard biological parts, distributing this schema for comments from the broader compbio community, and creating a draft API for programmers to work with the new schema and integrate existing tools such as TinkerCell, BrickIt, Clotho, and BioBrick Studio.

The second meeting, the First International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA), was co-sponsored by SynBERC and brought together researchers from the synthetic biology and design automation communities to examine the concepts, methodologies and software tools for the automated synthesis of novel biological functions. The specific focus was on the application of computational expertise from electronic circuit design to these areas. The meeting was held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco in conjunction with the Design Automation Conference, the premier conference of the electronic design automation community with over 10,000 attendees.

The IWBDA proceedings are located at http://cctbio.ece.umn.edu/iwbda/proceedings.pdf