Team:UUlm/Contribution
How to iGEM?
A beginner’s guide for participating at iGEM
Welcome to the iGEM beginner’s guide. This guide is designed to make it as simple as possible for new teams to join the iGEM competition for the very first time. If you are an already experienced team you may still learn something from this guide. As we, the team from Ulm, Germany, participated for the first time in 2020 we wished this guide would have already existed back then to help us. So, we decided to make this our contribution to iGEM and all future teams. Cheers!
Proclaimer
This document is supposed to help you, finding your way through all steps of a successful participation at the iGEM competition. For this purpose, it contains many tips and information, we gained during our first year at the competition. This information is not universally applicable to every situation your team might experience. As everything you will experience will at least slightly differ from our own experiences, you should never take anything for granted and always take multiple sources into account when making important decisions. The judging criteria of the competition are very flexible for example, so we try to stay as general as possible, regarding information about those. Especially questions concerning legal matters are highly complex, dependent on your country, time, and many other factors. Therefore, we take no responsibility for any information provided in this document.
We do our best to make this document useful for everybody. So, if you find mistakes, don’t agree with something, or if you experienced something different, please contact us at igem@uni-ulm.de. We highly appreciate your help!
The great iGEM Checklist
To make it easier for you to see where you stand in the competition, here is a short checklist. These are some basic steps, that will make the start a little easier. This is not meant to be a list where you start out with 1. and check off one point after the other. The aspects are roughly organized in chronological order; however, many things need to be worked on simultaneously.
- Find your topic.
- Find principle investigators, instructors and advisors
- Assort a team
- Get you schools or universities approval/assistance
- Open an account
- Take care of the legal aspects of starting a scientific group (these can vary for every country)
- Secure funding and financial support from sponsors
- Register to iGEM
- Start your lab work
- Think about human resources
- Join collaborations
- Join collaborations
- Think about your contributions
- Create BioBricks
- Present your work
Important parts of the competition
To start off, here is a short overview of some of the more important aspects of iGEM. Of course, your research and lab work are the central point of your project. Apart from that, there are a lot of other parts to consider. These are all found in the medal criteria. Aim and apply for gold. That way if you do not meet all the criteria it is still possible to get a lower medal.
One of the most important medal criteria is human practices. Here you are supposed to show that your project is aimed to improve the world and that you are working together with the community. As well as working with the community, you should also get in touch with other iGEM teams. Plan and organize collaborations well and contact teams from early on.
A medal criterion that is in close relation to your lab work, is BioBricks. These are biological parts (usually DNA sequences) that you create during the work in the laboratory. To find out more about adding BioBricks to the iGEM database go to “Creating parts”.
Finding your topic
The first step of the competition is choosing the topic. It is important to take some things into consideration. Firstly, the project should not only aim to discover something new but mainly seek to improve or solve a relevant problem. It is helpful if the groundwork has already been laid and the basics have been studied. However, make sure that your project is original. It should leave a positive impact on the world, so aim for the stars but still stay grounded and consider the logistics. Keep the specifications from the iGEM Headquarters in mind and be aware of your limits regarding scientific work.
Team
Responsibilities
For a successful project it is important to have a good team. It should consist of members with a broad spectrum of expertise. You should think about whom you want on your team beforehand. That way you can target specific groups of people during recruiting. The makeup of your team depends mainly on your project topic, however there are a few members every team needs. The first people you should ask are your principle investigators, instructors, and advisors. Apart from these members you will also need people, who…
- work in the lab
- take care of funding and finances
- know about legal matters
- work human practices
- collaborate with other teams
- know their way around computers
- can create creative content (drawing, photoshop, video editing, etc.)
- take care of social media
Recruitment
Once you know who you want on your team, you need to find out how to get them to join. The easiest way is to go into lectures and ask the people there. By selecting the lectures carefully, you can already choose what kind of people you are recruiting. For example, if your team is missing someone who can handle the software aspects of the competition, you can go into a lecture about computer science. Don’t go unprepared! Put together a short presentation explaining iGEM and your project idea.
A great motivation for joining is the fact that participating in an international competition is an excellent reference on your resume, as well as a once in a lifetime chance to conduct scientific research as a student.
Team management
For a team to function well, the members need to stay connected and be able to communicate. Thanks to social media, messenger services and video calls this is not very difficult. However, it might help to have team meetings in person to discuss important matters. For those meetings to go smoothly, it is best to make an agenda beforehand and send it to the rest of the team. That way everybody can prepare for the meeting and it will be more efficient.
In our experience it is also helpful to divide your team into smaller work groups. These consist of two or three people depending on the task and have one group leader. The smaller groups can then report back on their progress to the whole team in meetings.
Organizing many people can be difficult. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools, that can help with that.
Excel
It has proven useful to have a table with the contact information of every team member (phone number, e-mail, …) and their part in the team (IT, lab, …). This way you have an overview over who is doing what and how to reach them. Watch out for data protection and be careful about handing out this information. (This is of course something that is different in every country see "Legal matters" for further information)
Online calendar
Even without a pandemic it is recommendable to have a team calendar. It allows for long term planning and gives a great overview over deadlines and dates. For example, you can use Microsoft Outlook calendar or similar programs.
Online surveys
For example, doodle surveys are helpful in finding dates for meetings.
Communications
As already mentioned, communication is key for a good work relationship. If meetings in person are not possible (for example during a pandemic), team meetings can be held by video conferences. Programs that can be used are Zoom, Skype or others. Another way to stay in contact is via e-mail or over messenger systems. Especially with messenger systems you want to be careful about security. Some are safer than others, so be mindful about what you share.
Data sharing
If you want to share files with your teammates there are a lot of ways to do that. The easiest way is to send the file via e-mail. This doesn’t work for larger files, since there is a limit to the size of a document that can be sent by e-mail. That is why larger files should be uploaded into a cloud store e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive etc. (Our team shares papers and other files over the “shared documents” option in our universities mailing list.)
Important websites
There are four important websites for the competition. They are all linked together but it is often easier to visit them directly.
Main page (igem.org)
This page is very helpful to finding out what iGEM is and gives a short overview over the contest. It is great for getting to know iGEM. However, it does not show information on the current competition and is thus not very helpful regarding dates and deadlines. For these you need to visit the current page of the year.
Page of the current year ([year].igem.org)
This is the page where you can find all the relevant information for this year’s competition. It includes a calendar with all the deadlines, as well as the judging forms and medal criteria for the respective year.
Team page
This page is very important for your team. From here you can get to your team’s wiki and your submitted parts. It also shows information on your team. Every member has to create an account and sign up in order to be part of the competition. A guide to creating an account can be found here.
The team wiki shows all the work your team has accomplished and is an important part of the competition. Please note that there is a deadline for the wikis. The servers are often overloaded in the time before the wiki freeze, so be sure to upload your articles with time to spare.
To create your wiki, you use HTML. This is a “programming language” used to design websites. It is not very hard to learn and there are many tutorials. A few commands are enough to configurate the team wiki.
Creating parts (parts.igem.org)
Another important part of iGEM is creating biological parts and registering them on your team page. The name of a part is always built like this: BBa_[letter][team number][part number]
To keep an overview of your submitted parts it is best to compile all the information in a table. An example table can be found here.
A guide to submitting parts can be found here.
If you want to find out how to edit parts, click here.
Apart from submitting parts electronically, it is also possible to send them directly to the iGEM headquarters.
Legal matters
When setting up and organizing an iGEM team, there are some legal things that must be observed. It is advisable to open a bank account immediately after the establishment. Usually this is possible through the university. With a little luck, the university will provide you with an accompanying person who will support you in legal questions. Allow some time for this step.
Once the account has been opened, you can search for sponsors. The tax law of the respective country must be observed! Maybe you can get around this with donations in kind. You should also secure yourself legally against the sponsor with a contract. Here the services of both contractual partners must be precisely recorded. This serves to avoid misunderstandings.
Publishing
When publishing logos, images and videos, make sure that you have the license or that you are using license-free material. It is possible to apply a filter to your search engine for license-free pictures. However, this is not a guarantee, so inform yourself about the origin of your materials.
In the case of self-created material, all persons involved must agree to its publication. This is (at least in the EU) also valid for pictures of team members. Make sure you are legally safe in this regard.
When publishing a scientific text e.g. a paper, it is also very important to quote and reference correctly. The APA style referencing is recommended here. There are support programs for this, e.g. Microsoft Word.
Software
Software for editing images and videos, but also software that is required in the laboratory, are important tools for the project. There are many free programs out there, but pay ware usually has some advantages. In most cases it is possible to obtain the license from the university.
Some helpful software
- plotting graphs:
- Wolfram Mathematica
- SciDavis (Freeware)
- drawing structural formulas
- ChemSketch (Freeware)
- DNA editing
- CLC Workbench
- Genome Compiler (Freeware)
- SnapGene Viewer (Freeware)
- text editing, flyers posters etc.
- Microsoft Word
- Adobe InDesing
- storing and editing datasets
- Microsoft Excel
- working with pdf files
- Adobe Acrobat Reader (semi freeware)
- PDF24 (freeware)
- image editing
- Adobe Photoshop
- video editing
- Blender (Freeware)
- Adobe After Effects
SARS-CoV-2 - our experience with the pandemic
In the end we would like to share a few experiences we have gained over the last year, especially with regard to the global pandemic. If you are thinking about participating in iGEM for the first time during the outbreak of a global pandemic – well, there are better ideas. Participating in a global contest for the first time without experience is not easy at the best of times. Adding a global pandemic does not help.
Two of our main problems, apart from not being able to meet in person, were that we were not able to work in the lab and that finding sponsors was very difficult. The pandemic effected the economy which is why finding sponsors wasn’t easy. It is common to get a lot of rejections from possible sponsors, however, being an unestablished team with no previous successes to show, we heard “no” quite often. It is important not to let that get you down, but instead to keep on trying.
We also had the problem that getting an bank account took longer than we expected, especially with the university being in lockdown. That is why it took us quite a while to contact potential sponsors.
Our University went into lockdown in March 2020. There are still many regulations and working from home is very much encouraged. These circumstances caused us to shift our focus away from the lab work. We are glad that eventually, it was possible for us to start our work there.
Of course, the most difficult part was that it was impossible for us to meet up in person. Instead we held a lot of video conferences and learned to be very patient with the internet.
All in all, it has been an interesting year and we had a lot of fun and learned many things. We are looking forward to participating again next year, after all the groundwork has now been laid and the starting difficulties have been overcome. We are hoping this guide will encourage and help other first-time teams and make their start a little easier.