Team:Chalmers Gothenburg/Experiments/Flowcharts

Chalmers Gothenburg iGEM 2016

NOTEBOOK
Flowcharts

Flowcharts for laboratory work

Flowcharts is a good way to visualize a whole process or an entire project. From the extraction of genome to transformation of the assembled construct. In the lab it sometimes is hard to keep track of what you are doing is going to be used for, especially when you are several people working in shifts on the same tasks. The flowchart allows for the whole lab to quickly see where in the process the specific task fits in and adapt the protocol after that. Having flowcharts also makes troubleshooting easier since you can overview an entire process and thus identify problems that might occur. Furthermore, this overview makes it a lot easier to research protocols and procedures and foresee potential bottlenecks.

How to make them?

Designing a flowchart is not an especially complicated process. The main question is what level of detail the flowchart should contain. This in turn depends on what purpose the flowchart has and what information the user might need. A more experienced person understands what intermediate steps that are excluded and thus won’t need such a level of detail as a beginner need. In turn the flowchart can contain a larger portion of the project.

Examples