Team:Brno Czech Republic/Contribution

Contribution

As a contribution to iGEM, we've created a Handbook: How to handle Bacillus subtilis and Team seeker, which may come in handy for future iGEM teams. We consider them very helpful and we hope that both of them will significantly lighten their work-load. Sharing know-how and seeking appropriate information in a quickly developing field such as SynBio is absolutely essential. And iGEM offers the possibility to draw from reliable sources for a faster start. We would like to contribute to the iGEM community and help new teams by passing on this software and troubleshooting document.

Handbook

This handbook was written by iGEM Team Brno a.k.a. Generation Mendel in September of 2020. We decided to write this easy and to-the-point manual for everyone who is working with Bacillus subtilis for the first time and who is maybe struggling a little (like we were). We summarize basic workflows so that some amazing projects won't get stuck on optimizing transformant selection. There are lots of problems you encounter when carrying out an experiment. Madness is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We have spent hours and hours working with this organism and we have many hacks that we want to share with you. We hope that this text will spare you from carrying out many unsuccessful experiments. Good luck working with Bacillus subtilis.

You can find Our Handbook as a PDF file here.

Team Seeker

When we started searching for potential topics for our iGEM project, we encountered many issues when searching through other team's projects. We needed to check that some teams from previous years haven't done something similar to our project. We also wanted to find some inspiration on what areas and topics can be done in iGEM and what methods can be used to achieve our goals. It was complicated and a waste of time in a lot of cases. The previous team seeker only allowed us to search through the years 2016 and earlier. Without a tool like this, we could not effectively look for a wikis of teams working on a certain topic, as the only search criteria we could utilise was the name of the team and the year of the competition.

So we decided to make an improvement: Create a simple Team Seeker, which will include all teams that have competed so far, but will also be easy to update and expand its database to include future years of the competition. And here it is! Our Team Seeker. It allows anyone to easily search through team names, competition years as well as project descriptions, making it easier to find wikis focusing on the topic of choice. The aim of this project is to simplify going through large volumes of data and thus allow new teams to search effectively and help them identify research opportunities.

You can find more specific details about the Team seeker as a PDF file here.
And find working solution here. See or fork our solution here.