At Ginkgo, we think that having the right CAD tools will be invaluable in improving our ability to engineer biological systems. As Tom likes to put, we need “push tools” that will let you put in a proposed design and then tell you all the mistakes you made during the design. (To hear Tom’s take on the subject, check out the video of his talk from the Synthetic Biology 3.0 conference in Zurich–scroll to the bottom of the page.)
As an initial step towards this larger goal, Austin has written a BioBrick part primer design tool. The tool lets you enter a part DNA sequence and it will give you back primer sequences for converting that sequence to a BioBrick part.
The tool is far from perfect, but in the spirit of “release early and release often”, Austin has made it available to the community. Please feel free to send us your feedback.