This is the first time that we have attended the meeting since we formed the team. At this Shanghai regional meeting, each team showed their project ideas, which made us realize that iGEM is a big family full of ideas and creativity. Of course, our team also showed the initial concept of the software. Exposed to the opinions of all teams including the experimental team and the software team, we further clarifying the in-depth direction of our project.

Fig1. Presentation in New York University Shanghai

INTEGRATED:

Before attending the meeting, we have determined that the theme of the project is the metabolic pathway. After communicating with other teams at this conference, we learned more about the experimenters, the target users of our software, and their needs for information on enzymes and parts. So, we added the functions about enzyme and parts to our software.

This meeting is the Nanjing Regional Meetup. After a period of work, we had completed the idea of our software workflow and presented it to more teams at this conference. Here, we accepted the comments of teachers and entrepreneurs. The most impressive one is that focus on just one thing. Because of the limitation of time, we may be not able to make every part to be perfect, but we can lay emphasis on a certain aspect and make this aspect to be as good as possible. With this suggestion, we adjusted our plan about the software.

Fig2. Team member in Nanjing regional meetup

INTEGRATED:

After the Shanghai regional meeting in NYUSH, we originally intended to implement path search, enzyme selection, and parts design in our software. After learning more about current tools on parts, in light of the recommendations made by the judges at this meeting, we decided to focus the software on pathways and enzymes, especially enzyme selection, which led us to teachers and labs, seeking theoretical support.

In order to further investigate the project, with the help of our PI Fei Jian, we contacted the teacher of microbiology in East China University of Science and Technology, professor XuZhang. We introduced our project to the teacher, who was also interested in iGEM and our project content, so we had a very deep communication with professor zhang. The suggestions from him are as followed.

Fig3. Communication with professors in ECUST

INTEGRATED:

Based on last year's project, we are prepared to focus on adding the function of enzyme selection, which is approved by the teachers. Because of this human practice, we opened up our horizons in this regard. After reading the literature, we gave up the teacher's advice on the flora, but we still listened to some of their suggestions and started to integrate the physical and chemical properties of the enzyme from the public database. So far, we have completed the idea of the function of the software. Next, we need to work on the practicality of the software functions.

In order to verify whether our software is useful, we paid a visit to GENEWIZ and wanted to get some useful suggestions from company. GENEWIZ is a company that involved in many biology fields like gene synthesis, protein optimization and synthetic biology, besides, some of our team members are users of GENEWIZ. So, we chose it as the first company to visit and we thought we may get some answers we want.

In this human practices, we first gave a brief introduction about the functions that the software had already done and what we wanted to do, therefore, we pointed out that enzyme selection and optimization are the key points of our project, and we would like to know how to make our results more reliable and more practical.

On enzyme selection, firstly, they suggested that we could widely read articles about protocols to realize certain pathway, and conclude their methods to select enzymes. Secondly, they told us that the selected enzyme's physical and chemical character must be very stable, which means it can work as widely as possible. Thirdly, we should take the whole process and the final result into consideration, because enzyme selection is not a separated job and every best step does not have lead to an overall best.

On enzyme optimization, they honestly told us that each enzyme optimization was able to be a project, so it was hard to find a general method for all enzymes, but we caould consult some teachers major in biochemistry, maybe they had some ideas about it. Although we didn’t get a specific method from GENEWIZ, they gave us some suggestions about scoring those enzymes. From gene synthesizing, their production department gave us some deduction items, the most typical of which was some sequences in certain species like E. coli were difficult to synthesize in the productive process.

Fig4. Communication with GENEWIZ

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Going to a synthetic biology company for communication is the best way to test the usefulness of software. During the conversations with the staff, we thought that if the functionality of our software is perfectly implemented, the results it gives will be very informative. So we referred to the experience and information provided by the company's staff and began to establish the ranking criteria of our own in terms of enzyme selection. In this way, the prototype of our software is formed, which means we can show it to more people for suggestions.

CCiC, which full name is Conference of China iGEMer Community, is a very important and helpful platform for iGEMers in China. There are experienced judges from iGEM to give us advice from a professional and competition point of view, and we also have the opportunity to learn about other teams' projects, and we will also provide advice and help to each other.

In the CCiC presentation, we already had a demo of the software. In this way, we made the iGEM teams from China have a specific understanding of our software, so that we can seek cooperation to verify that the results given by our software are credible. At the same time, we also had technical exchanges with other software teams.

For the overall design, we received suggestions of the web page design. For example, we should know more about what users want so that we can design corresponding functions. What’s more, the design on the web page should be more user-friendly, which means we should point out what steps should users do.

Fig5. Post session in CCiC

INTEGRATED:

After the practicality, we need to consider the credibility. In terms of results verification, we found the China Agricultural University, using their pathways to verify our software results in a collaborative manner, and got good results. At the same time, we also provided them with relevant information. This proves the credibility of our software. In addition, for the function about parts which we do not intend to focus on, we used the existing database of the University of Electronic Science and Technology to expand our software and as a collaboration. After the software's functionality was successfully implemented, we decided to start a user survey of the software interface design under the advice of CCiC's judges.

Fig6. Partial result of questionnaire

We set a questionnaire to confirm the design of our software web page about which kind of web page users want, including color, hint style, result form, file options and record saving. This is the final step in completing our software.

When our team was founded, we reached a consensus and decided to start this year's work based on last year's project and identified the theme as metabolic pathways. Through two regional meetings, we extensively understood the needs of laboratory workers and determined that the direction of the software are pathways, enzymes, and parts. After a period of work, we sought the teacher's advice and perfected the software concept at the theoretical level. When faced with practical problems, we visited the company to ensure the usability of our software. At the same time, we fed back several changes of the software to the company and the teachers, constantly seeking suggestions for improvement. After completing the software, through a larger meeting, we used the collaborations to verify the results of our software and expanded the functions. Finally, the interface design of our software was determined in the form of user research.

All in all, through the integrated human practices among teachers, companies, and iGEM teams, we have finally realized a powerful, practical, credible, beautiful, and user-friendly software.