Description

Overview

This year，BioMaster 2.0 is no longer just aimed at individual users like iGEMers or synthetic biologists, but also serves as an auxiliary database for synthetic biology software design. As a result, our collaboration section involves not only feedback from many individual users, but also some assistance for other software design projects.

UESTC-China

In early May this year, we co-hosted the 5th Southwestern iGEM Exchange Conference with the UESTC-China, and invited iGEM teams from Sichuan University, Third Military Medical University, Sichuan Agricultural University and Xi’an Jiaotong University, as well as iGEM Asia Ambassador Dorothy Zhang to participate.

Due to the early launch of the conference, the progress of the experimental/software projects of each team is not much. The content of the conference is mainly based on mutual exchange of projects or sharing of competition experience.

In addition to the communication between the teams, iGEM Asia Ambassador Dorothy also introduced the update of the 2019 competition and how to conduct human practical activities more effectively and scientifically to guide the project.

Through this exchange meeting, everyone adjusted and modified their own project after discussion. We also got important suggestions to promote the project from this meeting, including optimizing the search, ensuring the accuracy of mapping relationship between databases and so on.

https://2019.igem.org/Team:UESTC-China/Collaborations

Tongji-Software

The project of Tongji-Software this year is Pathlab: An integrated platform for pathway construction with enzyme information. They hope that after referring to the metabolic pathway generated by the platform and obtaining the information about enzymes needed to complete the pathway, users can also select the promoters, RBS and terminators needed to build the complete plasmid. Users can search for the relevant type of part for information and select it themselves.

In this regard, our team provided data support for the part of search they created, including information of all promoters, RBS and terminators. In addition, when using Pathlab, users can also directly click on part to link to our database to get more detailed information.

https://2019.igem.org/Team:Tongji_Software/Collaborations

USTC-Software

USTC-Software’s project is Foresyn: Making Reliable Customized Flux Analysis With Ease. The neoteric workflow management based on customized database allows users to build their models for flux analysis, get visualized output and easily share with others.

After building the model with this software, users can also get relevant biobrick recommendations. BioMaster 2.0 provides detailed information on all biobricks, and users can find comprehensive information about the parts of many useful databases in this integrated database without multiple jumps.

https://2019.igem.org/Team:USTC-Software/Collaborations

SCU-China

After we got the software test version, we went to Sichuan University and invited SCU-China to participate in our test. They sincerely put forward suggestions for BioMaster's search, function and appearance, including fast rotation image conversion on the home page, improvement of SBOL screenshot function, and hope that BLAST function can give users more convenience such as adjusting related parameters by themselves.

We also learned more about their cordycepin project. Cordycepin is very beneficial but very expensive to produce. The project of SCU-China is to realize the production of cordycepin in yeast, which effectively reduces the production cost. This is a very meaningful project. We suggest that they contact more drug manufacturers in Human Practices to try to commercialize it.

https://2019.igem.org/Team:SCU-China/Meetup/UESTC

Feedback

In the Software testing stage, we invited many iGEM teams to use our Software and put forward suggestions for improvement, including Tongji-Software, CAU-China, judge Weitong Guo of the 6th CCiC and so on. They all gave us sincere suggestions for use, and our project was further improved under their suggestions.

For example, CAU-China gave a lot of suggestions on many details of user experience, including adding some instructions or demonstrating video to make users more familiar with it; CSU-CHINA put forward some advice on the use of functions, such as ‘team wiki’ search should be more convenient to add hyperlinks; Tongji-Software proposed that the name of the database can be marked when ID conversion to prevent confusion and so on. We would like to express our sincere thanks to these teams for their suggestions. Their sincere feedback made BioMaster more and more perfect.