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Seekers
Right from the start, we decided that we were going to develop software tools to make the work of our team easier. We also wanted to share the tools with the iGEM Community to help everyone, too!
We made two different Seeker brand tools (BioBrick Seeker and Team Seeker) for making the research part of iGEM projects a little easier. Both have tens of thousands of lines of data to search through, but the results update in real-time. Both get their content from JSON files that can be easily added to and which are completely separate from the code, so expanding the tools for the future can be done by just adding new data!
Both of the Seekers were written in JavaScript using the Angular.js library. They use Yeoman for scaffolding and deployment, and they are currently running on GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a free service and handles requests very quickly, so they will stay available for the foreseeable future.
All of the code is available as open source on GitHub and is free to be reused, modified and expanded. All of the projects can be found through our GitHub organization Quiet Sushi Force.
BioBrick Seeker
BioBrick Seeker was created to make searching for the needed BioBricks in the 2014 iGEM Distribution a bit easier. It can be used to find Bricks with a certain keyword or list all from a certain type. It even has a search for the part names to see if the Brick you need is in this year's distribution.
All of the code and installation instructions for future development are available on the BioBrick Seeker GitHub page.
Here's a screenshot of BioBrick Seeker and how it works if you want to search for BioBricks that have the word 'fluorescent' in their description.
BioBrick Seeker reception
The tool was received very well and got a lot of mentions on Twitter and got even featured on the iGEM 2014 Help page. We put Google Analytics on the site to get a rough idea of where in the world the tool was actually used. Turned out it was used on 5 different continents and many many teams all around the world.
Here's a screenshot of the amount of sessions from different parts of the world. (12th October 2014)
Team Seeker
Team Seeker is a tool that you can use to search through the project abstracts of past teams. With this tool you don't need to use hours of research time to make sure that your idea hasn't been done yet in iGEM but you can just type in what you wish to find! With Team Seeker it's also easy to find all the projects that are close to your interests and this way the background research becomes a lot easier. Team Seeker has a smart phrase search; writing relevant phrases or words in the search bar brings up projects realting to them.
All of the code and installation instructions for future development are available at the project's GitHub page.
Here's a screenshot of Team Seeker.
