BioBricks

Site of the day: http://scienceroll.com/

BioBrick standard biological parts are DNA sequences of defined structure and function; they share a common interface and are designed to be composed and incorporated into living cells such as E. coli to construct new biological systems. BioBrick parts represent an effort to introduce the engineering principles of abstraction and standardization into synthetic biology. The trademarked words BioBrick and BioBricks are correctly used as adjectives (not nouns) and refer to a specific "brand" of open source genetic parts as defined via an open technical standards setting process that is led by the BioBricks Foundation.
BioBrick parts were introduced by Tom Knight at MIT. Drew Endy, now at Stanford, and Christopher Voigt, at UCSF, are also heavily involved in the project. A registry of several thousand public domain BioBrick parts is maintained by Randy Rettberg team at http://partsregistry.org. The annual iGEM competition promotes the BioBrick parts concept by involving undergraduate and graduate students in the design of biological systems. The term BioBrick, intended to be used as an adjective, is a trademark of the not-for-profit BioBricks Foundation.

Other useful links:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/The_BioBricks_Foundation
http://sb4.biobricks.org/