Human Practices - Silver

Our Human Practices efforts this year have been quite fruitful. We have made more outreach connections this year, and gained valuable insight into how scientists use our software. Our goal was to expand our user base, and through our beta testing efforts we have more users and protocol than ever before.

ProtoCat Beta Testing

Several teams have given us quite valuable feedback on ProtoCat through our beta testing initiative. We reached out to fellow iGEM teams and requested their assistance with testing ProtoCat, as students of biology and other sciences would better be able to evaluate whether or not ProtoCat is truly a useful service than the computer science students who designed it. The teams evaluated the software on several fronts: our Search Function, the Upload Process, the Category System, the User Page, and the Protocol itself. After they provided us with feedback, we gave them assistance with their wikis. Thank you to the following teams: MSU iGEM team, Carroll High School iGEM team, iGEM Peshawar, University of Westminster iGEM team, University of Florida iGEM team, and Michigan Synthetic Biology.

Menlo Innovations Meeting

Additionally, we met with the founders of Menlo Innovations, a local Ann Arbor technology business to discuss the future of ProtoCat, namely, ways to make our product more sustainable and get it adopted by more users. They were able to offer us quite useful advice that we will keep in mind as we continue to grow and develop not only our software, but our team.

iGEM North American Upper Midwest Meetup

This year we also attended the first iGEM North American Upper Midwest Meetup with Michigan Synthetic Biology, Michigan State University iGEM and the Carroll High School iGEM team. At this meetup, teams got to know each other while touring the scenic Michigan State University campus, and had the chance to practice presenting their projects to each other, receiving valuable feedback and having a great time!

All the groups:

The presentations:

IIT Madras Collaboration

Lastly, we have established a relationship with the iGEM team from IIT Madras this year.. During their work on their host organism database ChassiDex, they directed their data donors to upload their protocols to ProtoCat, further populating our database with protocol and increasing the usage of our software. They include the links to our database on the pages of their database as well.