I was part of this years Freiburg Software Team at the “International Genetically Engineered Machine competition” (iGEM), which is a BIG student competition at the MIT (yes, the famous one at Boston, M.A., USA) in the field of Synthetic Biology.

Our basic idea was to create a biological softwaresuite (so a scientific software biologist can use to plan there experiments) based on Google Wave.

That approach has the advantage that you get Waves real-time online collaboration features for free. As Wave is pretty new, under heavy construction and a bit unstable at the moment, that turned out be be much harder as we considered it, mostly because of Googles incomplete documentation and a lot of restrictions from Googles AppEngine.

Nonetheless we were able to lay a solid foundation for an open source project and created a good example for a more complex Wave addons.

We are working on a paper describing our approach at the moment, think i’ll write a bit more once we are done with that.

If you want to read some more about SynBioWave, visit our projectpage SynBioWave.org