Team:Amazonas Brazil/Software
iProGRAm
A platform for expand the iGEM experience
What's the boost?
Protocols are a set of well-documented steps to perform an experiment. It is through protocols that scientists can abstract and engineer their solutions. This standardization is the key to make it possible for scientists from the other side of the globe to reliably reproduce, in their labs, the results obtained by another scientist.
The algorithms are to Computer Science as protocols are to Biotechnology. Following the principles that jumpstarted the exponential growth of software development techniques, promoting reuse of code, peer review, and incremental development, the open source community revolutionized the way that software was being made and those principles can easily be translated to Biotechnology.
Advances in the opening of biological 'codes' has already promoted unpreceded developments in biological systems engineering, the most remarkable is the easily accessible NCBI database, which allows anyone to access detailed genomic and proteomic information of various species.
We envision a future where the abstraction for the creation of bioengineered living beings becomes more open, enabling anyone with the proper equipment and care, to reproduce reliably experiments and develop solutions.
How will we do this?
To make our library available we created a Web Application decoupled from our WebServer, named iProGRAm, iGEM Protocol Git Repository from Amazonas_Brazil team, to deliver an environment to create, store and share lab protocols.
Moreover, any current web based application can migrate their data to AlexAPI format and use this database in a unified fashion. And with their own customization many applications can share a common space.
This protocols platform will be able to search, cite and create protocols in a easy and fast way, creating an ecosystem to bring people together and generate positive interactions, promoting scientific growth.
How will it impact iGEM?
We believe that having such space would help everyone in the development of their project, reducing the amount of time taken in project design plan and increasing the success rate of teams. Helping everyone to achieve their results on time to deliver to the competition.
We were inspired by the open software practices that brought github.com to life and over the year has made a tremendous impact on how open source software is being developed. We hope that iProGRAm can be ourProgram and really impact iGEMers from around the world.
