CONTRIBUTION

IT Setup

This document describes our IT infrastructure that we employed to a) support our ongoing work throughout the year and b) to create our wiki We hope to provide some insights that might be useful to future iGEM teams.

Education Day Protocol

The iGEM Munich Education team organized a “Girls day”. Read more about the Girls day here. We believe that one of the best investments one can do for the iGEM Community is to inspire a new generation of iGEM participants. Especially because in our region of Germany, no high school teams participated in iGEM. Therefore we want to make it easier for other iGEM teams to inspire and school children about science and synthetic biology. Therefore we wrote a protocol to facilitate the planning of a day on which a group of school children come to the university to take part in a small experiment in the laboratory and/or get taught some information about the topic at hand.

Interlab Studies

One of the big challenges facing the field of synthetic biology is the ability to obtain reliable and repeatable measurements in different labs – a key component of all engineering disciplines. Over the past several years, iGEMers have been tackling this challenge through the International Interlaboratory (Interlab) Measurement Studies, the biggest interlaboratory study ever done in synthetic biology. The inter laboratory studies have helped the iGEM teams understand the importance of proper measurements to perform calibrations and produce reliable results. Performing such experiments with appropriate controls deepens the confidence and reliability of the results, contributing to the Interlab studies would help the future iGEM teams to perform fluorescence experiments without any bias.

We have written a protocol summarizing our results: “embedded PDF” Here you can find the raw data files of our results: “3 embedded PDFs”

Learnings and Tips

After working in a big team for almost a year on our iGEM project, we evaluated what went well and where we could have improved out team and project management. We realized that working on this huge interdisciplinary project requires a lot of management and teamwork. A lot went really well and we are proud of our work, but of course there are always things to improve. Here we share some general recommendations about working together on an iGEM project for future teams.

Meetings with Advisors

• online: ask to make photo of zoom video
• in person: ask to make photo in person
• request permission to use headshot of person
• keep protocols of all meetings and have them saved immediately. One person is responsible for making sure protocols are saved immediately

Wiki

• start wiki work early -> you can settle on a design early even if all the content is not there yet
  • inspiration: previous wiki pages, awwwards.com, dribble etc.
  • keep in mind judges might use phones, tablets, and laptops
  • use caniuse.com to make your website compatible with major browsers
  • education and human practices pages can be coded early because they have ongoing content throughout the year
• make photos of everything you do. they might be useful for the wiki

Recruiting

• define clear expectations of how much commitment is expected from members (required time commitment may be different (e.g. more vs less regular) for different teams. This helps new members know what to expect and allows you to remove people who are violating the commitment. This does not need to be enforced in a super strict way but it should be clear that if you do significantly less than the others, you have to leave
• make a list of roles and teams that you need and recruit for those. or let people specify their desired team when they apply. don’t recruit as many as possible and then decide on roles.

Wet lab

• define wet lab schedules early on and far in advance (2-3 months) so people do not do plan other things and regard it as a serious commitment that should have decent priority
• one lab manager who has an overall overview about the experiments
• long-term planning and ordering of required materials

Dry lab

• dry lab planning should start as soon as the topic is set.
• prediction of experiment should be ideally done before wetlab experiment.
• use literature value if wetlab experiment fail

Social

• assign a person(s) to organise social events. These need to be planned and this can be forgotten among all the lab work if no one is responsible for it

File Management

• as an iGEM competition team can be quite large, it is a good idea to have different folders for different teams or medal groups on the same drive
• it is also a good idea to have a master contact list as a shared spreadsheet because some contacts may be overlapped among teams (e.g. education and human practice may share some key contacts).