Fourth International InterLab Measurement Study

All of the 2017 iGEM teams are invited and encouraged to participate in the Fourth International InterLaboratory Measurement Study in synthetic biology. We’re hoping this study will get you excited for iGEM and help prepare you for the summer!

Please note: this is an optional and voluntary exercise for all teams.

A Brief History of the InterLab

Over the past two years, iGEM has advanced the frontiers of science with the two biggest interlaboratory studies ever done in synthetic biology. These studies established a baseline for replicability of fluorescence measurements and identified likely key sources of error, and have now been published as an open-access journal article in PLOS ONE.

To read the article, you can either click on the image to the right or go directly to the following URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150182.

Overview for the 2017 InterLab

We aim to improve the tools available to both the iGEM community and the synthetic biology community as a whole. One of the big challenges in synthetic biology is that measurements of fluorescence usually cannot be compared because they are reported in different units or because different groups process data in different ways.
Often we work around this by doing some sort of “relative expression” comparison; however, being unable to directly compare measurements makes it harder to debug engineered biological constructs, harder to effectively share constructs between labs, and harder even to just interpret your experimental controls.

InterLab Details

We are busy working on the 2017 InterLab study! More information will be available in early 2017.