The lab led by Nicole King in Berkeley has published some interesting results regarding the possibly multiple origin of multicellularity. They work mainly in choanoflagellates, which are closely related to the multicellular animals known as sponges. Make sure to check the resources section, it has plenty of choanoflagellates information. Click here to visit the King's Lab webpage.
iGEM stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine, which
is an annual Synthetic Biology competition held in the MIT. Lots of interesting genetic devices have been built since
the 2003 first edition, make sure to check all the Jamborees to see who won each year. Click here to visit the iGEM homepage.
The Registry of Standard Biological Parts is the repository where all the pieces generated in the iGEM competition are stored. As of November 18th there are 14925 parts listed. In this web you will find all pieces catalogued by: type, function, chassis/organism where it works and standard of assembly. Additional information of individual pieces is sometimes given.
Open Wet Ware is a wiki-like resource where science is shared to everybody. There are hundreds of working molecular biology protocols (anything from antibiotic use to oligo annealling) and an active comunity eager to solve your lab issues. You can even post your own protocols, this way you won't ever lose them. Click here to visit their webpage.
Lablife is a completely free lab manager, inventory/sample database and much more, all mixed up in a user friendly, web based interfase. You can even set your own lab webpage and share data with your labmates.
Ape is a free, cossplatform (Windows, Linux and Mac) plasmid editor tool that lets you browse, annotate and analize by the usual means (BLAST, PRIMER3, restriction analysis, virtual electrophoresis, translate, silent mutagenesis and much more) your DNA sequences. It can handle .ab1, .seq and other extensions, and creates visual graphics of your plasmids. Download it here.
B10NUMB3R5 (Bionumbers) is a database of relevant numbers for biology. It's an organized compendia of all sorts of parameters (Examples: number of distinct proteins in proteome of D. melanogaster, cell concentration at 1m depth in the sea, energy of covalent bond...), especially useful when modelling. Try it.
Synbioss is another resource for modelling, in this case there is a wiki-like structure, filled up with curated data focused on the protein-protein and protein-DNA interaction parameters that govern the most common synthetic gene networks. You will also find a software suite to simulate Synthetic Biology constructs and devices of your choice.