- Participants are exploring machine-readable biology protocols using XML, Haskell, and structured text to automate safety checks, equipment lists, and reagent tracking, with the EXACT yeast-competent-cell protocol cited as a successful parseable example.  
- A proposed “protocol creation wizard” would guide users through grammar-validated choices (materials, actions, parameters) and export the result to XML or another structured format, while an automatic safety-protocol generator could ingest formal protocols (e.g., pcr.xml) and output tailored safety instructions and containment levels.  
- OpenWetWare protocol pages are being evaluated as a starting corpus, but inconsistent notation (e.g., “2 volumes EtOH”) and the absence of explicit pre-/post-conditions and equipment counts were highlighted as obstacles to automation.  
- SKDB, an open-source hardware package manager, is being scoped to “volumetric-related lab protocols” only—protocols expressed as moving defined liquid volumes—because volumes map cleanly to the `pq` (Pint-Quantities) library and still cover a useful subset of biology workflows.  
- A “pipetting grammar” is under discussion as a declarative way to encode wet-lab protocols, with the observation that most parameters reduce to volumes, whereas temperature and other scalar constraints are harder to model.  
- Mendeley’s OCR/metadata extraction was found weak on older Nature papers; Zotero’s publisher-specific scrapers and full-text indexing were judged more reliable for managing large PDF collections.  
- DIYbio mailing-list fragmentation (city-specific lists like diybio-nyc, diybio-boston) was criticized for diluting attention, and cross-posting etiquette was debated.  
- Shared resources include Wiley Current Protocols, Protocol-Online’s breakthroughs list, the EXACT project page at Aberystwyth, and kanzure’s mirrored book/paper archive at heybryan.org/books/.