Judging

Bronze

Team registered and ready for Jamboree
Wiki and posters finished (see us and our poster in zone 5 in Hall D on the second floor, stall 259)
Presentation ready and waiting
Check in, safety and judging forms completed
Parts documented on and samples submitted to Registry
Attributions done on attributions page
Added to characterisation of BBa_J23111, BBa_K808000 and BBa_E0040
Completed InterLab measurements

Attribution: logo © CC BY 2.0

Silver

Characterized our 15b-GFP toehold switch and it works
Added our parts to the registry
We collaborated with Judd-UK, Westminster, Carroll HS, EPFL and Oxford
Detailed silver human practices and plenty of engagement, including creating the high school teams guide.

Gold

Integrated human practices into every part of the project
Improved the design of Aachen’s fluorometer, and then built our own
Modeled just about everything - including the structure of our switches, the reaction kinetics, the uncertainties on our model and the cost-effectiveness of a screening programme with our test.
We’ve demonstrated it all works

Attribution: logo © CC BY 2.0

Key Papers

We have cited loads of papers in our wiki which makes it hard to see which ones are the most important. To make it easier for anyone reviewing our project, or wanting to get a better understanding into the principles off which our project is based, we have compiled the following list. Below are the papers which were key to our project design.

Toehold Switches, their design and use

Green, A. A., Silver, P. A., Collins, J. J., & Yin, P. (2014). Toehold switches: de-novo-designed regulators of gene expression. Cell, 159(4), 925-939. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.10.002
Green, A. A., Kim, J., Ma, D., Silver, P. A., Collins, J. J., & Yin, P. (2016, September). Ribocomputing devices for sophisticated in vivo logic computation. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (p. 11). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/2967446.2970373
Pardee, K., Green, A. A., Takahashi, M. K., Braff, D., Lambert, G., Lee, J. W., ... & Daringer, N. M. (2016). Rapid, low-cost detection of Zika virus using programmable biomolecular components. Cell, 165(5), 1255-1266. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.04.059
Machinek, R. R., Ouldridge, T. E., Haley, N. E., Bath, J., & Turberfield, A. J. (2013). Programmable energy landscapes for kinetic control of DNA strand displacement. Nature communications, 5, 5324-5324. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6324

Micro-RNAs as Biomarkers

Hennessey, P. T., Sanford, T., Choudhary, A., Mydlarz, W. W., Brown, D., Adai, A. T., ... & Califano, J. A. (2012). Serum microRNA biomarkers for detection of non-small cell lung cancer. PloS one, 7(2), e32307. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032307
Etheridge, A., Lee, I., Hood, L., Galas, D., & Wang, K. (2011). Extracellular microRNA: a new source of biomarkers. Mutation Research/Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, 717(1), 85-90. DOI: 10.1016/j.mrfmmm.2011.03.004

Wiki

We've really tried to go for Best Wiki this year. The most important part of course is the content. We used Google Docs to write and work as a team on every page - resolving a total over 400 comments. We tried to get the text done as early as possible - and succeeded to some extent, although only began uploading it to the wiki a couple weeks before the deadline. Adam, our student leader who did the bulk of wiki editing made over 1300 edits - and as a result has gone slightly insane.

One problem with previous wikis is that they were inaccessibly written - often not building up explanations properly and lacking good structure to pages. This is likely down to the last minute rush before the deadline to get everything up - we started early and spent a long time perfecting our text so hopefully you find it all makes sense. We also had several people on our team test everything out for us from clicking every link to reading all the text and how it was formatted on the wiki to iron out bugs.

Another problem is that previous wikis took ages to load. Part of this is down to the iGEM servers, but often the problem stems from poorly written code. Large swathes of redudant code often lurk in the shadows, and images are often uploaded at much too high resolution and without being compressed at all. We saw some homepages well over 10MB! Our homepage weighs in at a lean 0.7MB, and all our other pages are similarly optimized. We've done this by analysing our site with Google's Pagespeed and Lighthouse auditing tools, and made large gains by correctly sizing images, compressing images and using SVGs where possible.

Using SVGs often is also good as they can be embedded more easily into the page, meaning page load times are further improved as the browser doesn't have to send another request to fetch the images seperately. SVGs also allow for infinite scalability allowing our wiki to take advantage of high resolution screens like Apple's 'Retina Displays'. They're also powerful as they allow text to be displayed as text rather than pixels - allowing screenreaders to read them out, increasing the accessibility of our wiki.

Navigation is often poorly done - with thousands of nested subpages that aren't present in the navigation bar but are still very relevant to the project. We've used the default iGEM pages as far as possible to make finding the important parts as easy as possible and spent a long time thinking about the structure of our site. The navigation bar was significantly revised four times in efforts to make it as easy to find the relevant pages as possible, and we've avoided using extra nested subpages where not really necessary. We've also scattered links everywhere to prevent you having to hunt for where we reference another part of our project.

We believe many teams don't take full advantage of the template system Mediawiki offers. By compartmentalizing all our repeated sections we make our code more human readable, allowing members of our team with no coding experience at all to go in and edit sections. It also makes it easier to update styles - ensuring all our pages have a consistent feel that makes navigating them easier and as you learn what behaviours to expect makes the site easy to use.

We shared a lot of this knowledge with other teams, including Judd School, University of Westminster and Carroll High School. More information about this is available on our collaborations page.

All our code was written by current team members, except the small bits otherwise attributed. All images which we didn't make ourselves are attributed beneath the image. Images without explicit licenses are reproduced with written consent of the rights holders.

Jamboree

Come visit our stall - we are in zone 5 in Hall D on the second floor, stall 259

Presentation

Come watch our presentation at 3:30 on Friday in Ballroom B.

Team:CLSB-UK/Judging

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