Software

From the start, we planned to develop software tools to make the work of our team easier. We also want to share the tools with the iGEM Community to help everyone.

Seekers

The major tools we made are the Seeker-brand tools. First we made BioBrick Seeker. 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.

The next one was BioBrick Seeker., a tool to search through the project abstracts of past teams to see if something you've been thinking about has been done before and to find projects that work in a similar field to your own. It has a smart phrase search so writing anything in the search bar should bring up what you need.

Other software projects

A third one is the iGEM Wiki Quickifier., a tool to upload content to a particular team wiki without using the cumbersome wiki interface. It allows you to write all the pages as proper HTML and add template tags while uploading, so that they don't come in the way of writing actual content. It's work in progress and changing it to upload to other wikis than ours is not implemented, but if you know a bit of Python, it's easily done.

We didn't only build software tools though. We also made a silly game called Flappy Coli, where you are guiding a genetically modified pink bacteria through an iGEM-maze. It grows it's flagellum when you get farther and if you are good enough, it might grow a whole tail of flagella.

To demonstrate our work to the general public in an event called Summer of Startups Demo Day, we made a simulation that shows our system in action. It shows an animated bacteria plate with adjustable light intensity sliders to remotely control the bacteria. The proteins the bacteria produce are colors, so you can see how the changes in light intensity correlate to the color of the colonies on the plate. The simulation also has a nice grap that shows the protein levels in one second intervals so you can see more clearly what's going on in the cell.