Also interesting: they contributed their technique to the BioBricks Foundation: http://bbf.openwetware.org
Very exciting things coming as we get the protein expression laws down well. I can't wait to use http://mrgene.com to sequence DNA and a BioBrick Assembly kit to put it all together.
Biobricks are going to die. Restrtiction digest/ligation is too much of a pain in the butt. I've been in professional labs where it takes upwards of 8 tries to get ligation products in. People are going to move to Gibson Assembly. If you're interested in DIY bio, Gibson Assembly is the way to go.
Obligatory awful youtube video that does a bad job of explaining Gibson Assembly:
Digest & ligate isn't even the worst problem. Back in the day (2006) the quality control and standardization of bricks was dreadful, I haven't seen evidence that it's improved substantially since then. Polymerases per second (POPs), the measure of brick efficiency, seems like a bit of a pipe dream -- I'm yet to be convinced that it can survive brick composition.
Did you do iGEM? Back in the day I started the iGEM team at Brown. We couldn't scum a PCR machine off anyone so we spent the summer doing minipreps. A few weeks before the jamboree, we refined our models a bit and showed that the parameter space in which our project would function was so narrow that it would probably never work. Oops!
never did iGEM. I think it started when I was in grad school. I'm building a sub $500 PCR machine now, might start a company to sell them, bio kits, etc. I'm also thinking about making ethidium-free paradigm (using fluorescent primer adapters instead) and eliminating the use of E coli so that DIY bio can really pick up.
Obligatory awful youtube video that does a bad job of explaining Gibson Assembly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCWjJFU1be8