On researching previous iGEM policy and practices projects, we came across the Sheffield 2010 teams lab notation which they invented with the intention of standardising how protocols are written to make them easily accessible and understood by all. This was mainly to overcome barriers such as language or degree courses as many iGEM teams are interdisciplinary with some team members with no or very little laboratory experience.

Methods and Results

When we started researching this initiative further, we found it to be very confusing and difficult to understand. We decided to test the notation as it was initially with different members of the team: a science undergraduate, an engineering undergraduate and a science PhD student. We believed these people would cover a range of expertise and levels of background knowledge, which may have been a factor to take into account when gauging understanding of the protocols. We started by testing two different protocols that were written by the Sheffield 2010 team:

We gave each individual a copy of the protocols above with names of the experimental techniques omitted, alongside the original key. On testing with these groups of people, we concluded that the protocol would be better if it was to be targeted specifically at scientists, as they were able to slightly follow it; this was only because they could pick up on the objectives of the different protocols due to their experience. From the feedback after testing we concluded the fundamental problems:

1. The abbreviations were not consistent
2. The order in which protocols were written and presented did not flow correctly
3. There was no grouping on the key making everything confusing and difficult to find when translating protocol to instruction

We thought about how to reduce these problems and created a new, improved notation that took into consideration the problems identified initially:

Through our improvements, we used a colour key to represent actions, materials, substances and sterility level; when implementing this, we were careful to pick colours that could be easily seen by colour-blind individuals to make it more accessible. We also used indentations to show orders of instructions where things linked together.

To retest this, we sent the second iteration of the lab notation to the Valencia_UPV iGEM team. From this second testing and the comments and feedback, we saw some improvement but there was still a long way to go.

After further consideration and speaking to post-doctorate students, we concluded that this notation system would be better implemented as a computer programming language as it was already showing characteristics of some existing systems such as Python.

Discussion

On presenting this at YSB 2.0 and the UCL meet up, we received a lot of positive feedback and interest in the notation. Other teams and their members could relate to the lack of standardisation in this area of the project and agreed that this could be a solution to be pioneered.

We hope for this system to be used by future teams and potentially picked up to be implemented into a computer programming language as it has a lot of potential if done successfully.