Team:Imperial College/Implementation
Implementation
The Problem
We started our iGEM project by noticing that there was a discrepancy between biologists specialised in wetlab work and the tools created to help them. When it comes to lab automation, even when sufficient funds are available,
the challenges are new to lab workers. New probles such as coding and debugging take time to develop for a given machine and the temptation to use excel and undergrads is always present, therefore we want to help bring
the advances in automated workflows into synthetic biology labs everywhere.
Our Flyer
We carefully considered the problem at hand and considered the needs of the biologist persona we constructed. They would have to obtain an objective value from our tool, which would be an improved accessibility by the part
of inexperienced end users as well as versatility and functionality that would cater to a more experienced user. We provide value in the following ways: firstly the speed and power of SBOL Designer allows the production
of Genetic designs rapidly with the intuitive UI, all while having access to amazing libraries of genetic parts such as SynBioHub with the possibility of incorporating your own. Secondly the use of SBOL itself is a
great advantage since it allows for the sharing of genetic designs a large amount of information, this is a great tool for people to collaborate within the same lab or even between labs. Finally our pipeline enables
rapid implementation of DNA assembly providing even first time users with the powers of automation such as increased productivity, increase reliability and faster iterations. We validated our product with our collaboration
with iGEM Hamburg proving that another iGEM team could implement our pipeline in an afternoon. This also credited the software with user-friendliness as well as giving us feedback with their real-world concerns that
we plan to integrate.
Future Implementations
To bring SOAP Lab to a wider audience we plan to integrate it to a larger pipeline such as Galaxy-SynBioCAD, which incorporates the entire design-build-test-learn cycle, and are in discussions with the creators at the moment
(https://galaxyproject.org/use/synbiocad/).
With this possibility in mind, we aim to continue to improve and expand our tool based on user feedback, incorporating
additional Assembly methods and adding additional tools for user-friendly graphical representation like Plateo
