SUMMARY: Synthetic Biology is advanced by many users and relies on the assembly of genetic elements to devices, systems and finally genomes. SynBioWave is a software suite that enables multiple distributed users to analyze and construct genetic parts in real-time collaboration. It builds on Google Wave and provides an extensible robot-robot-user communication framework, a menu driven user interface, biological data handling including DAS and an internal database communication. We demonstrate its use by implementing robots for gene-data retrieval, manipulation and display. The initial development of SynBioWave demonstrates the power of the underlying Google Wave protocol for Synthetic Biology and lays the foundation for continuous and user-friendly extensions. Specialized wave-robots with a manageable set of capabilities will divide and conquer the complex task of creating a genome in silico. AVAILABILITY: The robot is available at [email protected], the source code at http://synbiowave.sourceforge.net

UNLABELLED: Biskit is a modular, object-oriented python library that provides intuitive classes for many typical tasks of structural bioinformatics research. It facilitates the manipulation and analysis of macromolecular structures, protein complexes and molecular dynamics trajectories. At the same time, Biskit offers a software platform for the rapid integration of external programs and new algorithms into complex structural bioinformatics workflows. Calculations are thus often delegated to established programs like Xplor, Amber, Hex, Prosa, Hmmer and Modeller; interfaces to further software can be easily added. Moreover, Biskit simplifies the parallelization of time consuming calculations via PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). AVAILABILITY: The latest snapshot of Biskit, documentation and examples are freely available under the GNU General Public License at http://biskit.sf.net (alternate url http://biskit.pasteur.fr).