Team:Hong Kong HKUST/human practice/start-up kit

Start-up Kit is the first comprehensive and handy tool that aims to help iGEM teams - particularly the new iGEMers, in initiating new human practice projects. Not only does it give iGEMers a quick guide to begin with, but it also provides them with a preliminary concept of human practice and analyzed data regarding the past projects, which will give teams a jumpstart to flexibly come up with their own novel human practice project.

HKUST iGEM 2014 team spent nearly the whole summer to collect information from all human practice projects done in the past. This large set of data was used as a base for the handbook, report, interview and the search engine. Each serves to interpret and use the database in a different way. For instance, the database is condensed into simple numbers in the handbook to represent frequency of types of projects done in the past. Report, on the other hand, incorporate the data to observe the general trend regarding human practice projects throughout the iGEM history. Interview questions were formed to show iGEM judges’ view on the previously done projects. Last but not least, search engine helps to find the desired information from the mass database more easily. However, due to the complexity and high level of computer coding knowledge required to build the search engine, we decided to reach out for help. Kevin Christian Wongso, a graduate of the HKUST class 2014, who has a bachelor degree in computer science has lent us a helping hand. Thanks to his help, now users are able to serach for information they want by simply typing a few keywords.