Feast your eyes on this:
The Biobricker portion of my Second Life work is officially almost done!
Most of my work today was chasing down the last few bugs in the assembly system. It can now build any biobrick device you can dream of, in game right before your eyes. Obviously, you will be able to build more than nonsense parts consisting of just terminators and promoters. I'm presently in the business of uploading all of the fantastic little icons Mandy has made to replace the letters standing in for buttons, incorporating them into the UI will be a pretty big cut and paste job though! Once they're all uploaded, I'll generate the first batch of physical parts, bundle them all together, and make the first ever release of the Biobrick UI to the other SLers for testing.
The Biobricker, in brief. The top row of buttons access the various biobrick parts encoded in the UI, with a constituitive repressor and terminator being the only examples right now. The other buttons open up menus, leading to activatable and repressable promoters, coding sequences, and operator sites.
The bottom row of buttons gives you control over the prospective device. Of particular importance is the 'B' button, which is where you'll click to build your device. The UI also supports deleting and inserting parts in the biobrick, permitting easy experimentation.
I had some doubts about just how useful and interesting the biobricker would actually be... but It's super exciting to see all the pieces coming together and working nicely!
Most of the rest of today was consumed with a presentation on our Fort MacMurray oilsands tour, as well as an intense question and answer drill, in preparation for the jamboree.
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