Background

The UT-Tokyo-Software team is planning software projects aimed to assist iGEM teams. For many teams, the majority of members are new-comers. Therefore, many of these teams require a substantial amount of time and effort at the beginning of the year to get to know iGEM, after which they will finally be able to start thinking about what they want to do. We believe that if this learning period can be made more efficient, the productivity of teams can be greatly enhanced. Although tutorials and search systems are provided at the iGEM website, we have decided to create our own set of programs that fill in some of the important gaps that we feel are left open at the iGEM sites. Our project consist of two parts: "Tutorial" and "Search".

Tutorial

To make new-comers get used to the iGEM earlier, well-designed educational materials are needed. We're planning to improve on the current official web-based tutorial. As a software project, we’re aiming to make it interactive and enjoyable to help beginners understand iGEM concepts and techniques. The themes included in the planned tutorials are "Biobricks", "Notable past projects", "Genetic networks" and so on.

Search

When building iGEM projects, we have to investigate relevant past projects and Biobrick parts. However the current Biobrick search system implemented in the parts registry displays all the parts containing the search query, and beginners frequently cannot judge which part is usable. The present situation for searching past projects is also difficult, for example because a cross-year search does not exist. To solve these problems, we are developing a new parts and past projects search systems. We are planning to implement an ordering (by popularity, part workability, keyword-relevance etc.) algorithm, a tagging system and a relevance-search which will enable searching, for example, “which is the most popular GFP part?”,or “look up all bioremediation projects which have won a gold prize”,or “are there any projects similar to this?”.