Gold Criteria Human Practices

Integration of Accessibility – A Step Towards Interdiciplinarity

Through a series of investigations, it became apparent that interdiciplinarity is pivotal to the facilitation of biological research, to which accessibility is a prerequisite. SMORE needs to be accessible in its readability, hardware, user experience and data to truly promote interdisciplinarity among researchers from different academic and funding backgrounds. Accessibility is integrated into SMORE in the following aspects:

Readability: the use of high readability introductory paragraphs in our wiki and in our microfluidic device protocol

Principle of Recombinatino: SMORE relies on the process of SSR, which is notoriously difficult to understand. We address this through a detailed animation video.

Hardware: SMORE's cell sorting strategy can be coupled to increasingly accessible microfluidic devices and syringe pumps, which can be controlled by our devised controller program

User Experience: software for easy and automatic design of oligonucleotides for target site synthesis

Data: open source design of microfluidic device and definitive target site sequence with experimental verification

The five aspects of accessibility ensure researchers from any academic background would enjoy working with SMORE. With the knowledge gap between researchers filled, SMORE provides a friendly platform for interdisciplinary research. On top of that, the high readability of SMORE’s wiki and protocol allows non-academics to appreciate and understand synthetic biology.