Supervision

Finally, we are interested in the boundary conditions of our system - is it capable of existing as an independent entity? Or do we need somebody to look after it? We asked the teams about their instructors and advisors, their role and their contribution to their work.

• We found that, for most teams, the supervisors had a guiding role, rather than a forceful, authoritative one; they were usually there to check that the work is going fine and everyone's on track. Most teams acknowledged that this worked well. -- It is useful to have someone monitoring and double-checking the progress.
  Supervisors keep us in check and make sure we stay on track. They will tell us if we lack some part.
  Our supervisor would sometimes check our constructs etc, because we didn't want to make a silly mistake. That was very good.
• The importance of having supervisors was also acknowledged by most teams; most teams said they depended quite a lot on the advice from those with more experience.
  We don't get almost any supervision, and our work has suffered because of that.
  We depend on the supervisors quite a bit, especially when we try something new, because there are a lot of things we don't quite know.
• Most teams had regular meetings to check in with their instructors; in most cases, the teams found this very useful. Regular check-in points may be needed, to ensure things are still on track.

Relevance to bacterial systems

In an iGEM team, supervisors and advisors usually take a monitoring & control role, which is a significant part of the execution of a project or a piece of work. From engineering project definitions, monitoring is the process of checking that as a project progresses, it will actually turn out the way it was planned; control involves the processes that need to be undertaken in order to bring the project back to the way it was originally intended.

The monitoring method used depends on the type of a project; the frequency of monitoring needs to be set. As found from iGEM interviews, regular checks helped the teams a lot to keep on track.

Hence, the bacterial system needs to be provided with some form of a monitoring and control protocol. First, there needs to be a physical output that can be measured. We used for example reporter proteins like GFP and degrons as monitoring tools. Following this monitoring we then need to be able to control the system accordingly.