Community

The iGEM community page lets you see what some of your fellow iGEM Teams are up to.

If you want to add something to this page, send us an email to hq (at) igem . org and we'll add it!

Team Aalto-Helsinki - BioBrick Seeker and Team Seeker tools

Hi,

We made a couple of tools to simplify our iGEM research work and we thought that they might be useful for other teams too.

BioBrick Seeker:
BioBrick Seeker is a simple but powerful tool that searches the BioBricks in the 2014 iGEM distribution. This tool shows the part’s name, description, type, location on the 2014 kit plates and includes the link to the part’s official page on the iGEM website. You can filter the BioBricks by brick type and backbone.

You can also search BioBricks by using words that are in their description. We were interested in scents, so 'odor' and 'fragrance' found us some useful BioBricks. There's also a search for the part name when you want to see if the BioBrick you found from the Registry is in the 2014 Distribution.

Team Seeker:
For searching through previous iGEM teams from 2008 to 2013. You can see what has already been done and how similar projects tackled their problems.

Both are work in progress and subject to improvements. If you found our tools useful or have ideas for improvement, contact us via Twitter @AaltoHelsinki or send e-mail to team (at) aaltohelsinki.com

Team Aalto-Helsinki

Teams SYSU-Software and SYSU-China - Biobrick Blast tool

Have trouble finding biobricks containing or related to a known sequence? Biobrick Blast Online can certainly help you! Made by SYSU-Software and SYSU-China, Biobrick Blast Online is an online Biobrick alignment and search toolkit. Enter only your sequence, and you will soon get all Biobricks that contain or are related to your sequence, as well as the overall information on those Biobricks.

This toolkit not only contains the latest complete iGEM part registry data but also helps you search Biobricks in 2013 or 2014 iGEM DNA Distribution. So move on and have a try!

If you need any help or have any suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us at sysusoftware (at) 126.com!

The online version of software has been released, and there is also a demo video available.

-SYSU-Software and SYSU-China

Automatically generate plans for assembling your genetic constructs

Dear iGEM Community,

We would like to introduce a tool for calculating cloning plans for assembling genetic constructs. This tool, Raven, inputs a library of parts and target constructs and determines optimized plans for assembling an arbitrarily large set of target constructs with a selected assembly method.

The software is freely available at ravencad.org where there are examples files and user videos to demonstrate how to use the software.

The work is also detailed in this month's issue of Nature methods: http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v11/n6/full/nmeth.2939.html

Thanks,

Evan Appleton, Boston University

Team Virginia - Survey

My name is Tom Moss, and I am a member of the University of Virginia's 2014 iGEM team. We have designed an online survey to gauge acceptance and understanding of synthetic biology by the general public. We hope that global distribution of and participation in this survey will allow for more targeted public education efforts in the human practices component of the iGEM competition. Participation would involve going to a public place and approaching pedestrians to fill out the short survey. In addition, if your team collects data from at least 20 participants, we will award your team a web badge. This web badge can be displayed on the team’s wiki, and will denote your participation in our study.

If you are interested in taking part in the survey, please contact me at virginia.igem (at) gmail.com for further information and instructions.

Thank you very much,
Tom Moss
Cara Broshkevitch
Grace Mantus

Participate in the iGEM Interlab Study!

Calling all iGEM teams!

Can your team measure fluorescence? Do you care about how well your parts work and whether they'll work the same for other people?

If so, we invite you to participate in the first iGEM interlab study! The interlab study is part of the new iGEM Measurement Track, but teams from every track are invited and encouraged to participate.

Participating is simple: you just need to build and measure three simple constructs. The goal is to find out how these measurements compare between different teams in different labs all over the world. If you want to get a little more in depth, there are extra credit studies to do as well.

Can you help us make this the biggest international interlab study ever performed in synthetic biology?

Email measurement (at) igem.org to sign up to participate (deadline: July 1st) or if you have questions.

iGEM 2014 Measurement Track Organizers
Jacob Beal - BBN Technologies
Traci Haddock - Boston University
Jim Hollenhorst - Agilent

Synthetic Biology: Engineering Complexity - Invitation to Participate in a Special Topic

"Dear iGEM Community,

Francesca Ceroni (former iGEM judge), Pablo Carbonell, and Karmella Haynes (current iGEM Head Judge) are organizing a new Special Topic issue for the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology: Synthetic Biology. Frontiers articles are rigorously peer-reviewed, can be disseminated freely and are widely read by your colleagues and by the broader scientific and medical research communities.

Please, see the link below for the full description of the topic:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Synthetic_Biology/researchtopics/Synthetic_Biology_engineering_/2866

The aim of the topic “Synthetic Biology: engineering complexity” is to gather views from specialists in the field about reconciling the inherent complexity of natural systems with traditional engineering principles. We are particularly interested in context-dependent behaviors of synthetic systems, and emergent behaviors of synthetic and semi-synthetic systems.

We would like to include a broad range of contributions - they can be reviews, research articles, opinion articles, etc.

Thus, we are writing to kindly ask if you will be able to contribute a manuscript to the topic. Please note that the deadline for manuscript submission is September 15, 2014. Author submission guidelines can be found here: http://www.frontiersin.org/about/AuthorGuidelines

Please contact Karmella Haynes to express your interest in contributing a manuscript. After you respond, you will receive a second automatic invitation for participation from the Frontiers website. If you have any questions, please contact karmella dot haynes at asu dot edu and we will do our best to assist you.

Kind regards,

Karmella Haynes – Arizona State University
Francesca Ceroni – Imperial College
Pablo Carbonell – University of Evry"

Team Uppsala - "Synthetic Biology: A Lab Manual"

"This is the first manual for lab work in SynBio. It is aimed at non-specialists and includes practical material for the iGEM competition. Sample book chapters and George Church's inspiring foreword are available free, and ordering information for the book and eBook version from just GBP19.00 are available at this link." - Team Uppsala

You can contact them at igemuppsala (at) gmail.com!

Team NTNU Trondheim - iGEM Matchmaker tool

"Looking for another team to collaborate with? Try the iGEM Matchmaker tool here and find other teams to give or receive help!" - Team NTNU Trondheim