Difference between revisions of "Team:BostonU HW/HP/Gold"

Revision as of 17:03, 18 October 2016

HUMAN PRACTICES: GOLD

Neptune: Accessible microfluidics for all
[Pardon, under construction]

In our Silver Medal Human Practices page, we outlined our public outreach and industry visits. These experiences drew our team to focus on accessibility in synthetic biology as a theme moving forward with our human practice contributions. For Silver HP, we contributed a set of informational blog posts on the history of intellectual property, and IP in software and in synthetic biology today. We welcome you to read these at our WordPress site :)

Moving forward with the development of Neptune, we decided that we would extend our silver medal HP theme of accessibility in synthetic biology. Indeed, we were developing a complete, end-to-end microfluidic development workflow. Having seen how inaccessible and prohibitively costly microfluidics are for researchers, and also having studied the virtues of open source tools for synthetic biology, we decided to integrate accessibility into our implementation of Neptune.

In this page, we cover 3 ways in which we expand on and integrate the theme of accessibility to our final product, Neptune.
-First, we made it a project criteria that Neptune must interface with low cost, open and readily available tools and hardware to create microfluidics.
-Second, we partnered with the NONA Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to increasing access, collaboration, and building a community around synthetic biology software tools.
-Finally, we offer our team as a point of contact to other iGEM teams that have created software solutions and would like to have these tools protected and stored on NONA.

Neptune: Low cost, easy to use, accessible

As we developed Neptune, we were faced with design choices that would have a large impact on how our workflow integrates with the synthetic biology community. In light of our Silver HP discoveries, we decided the most important design choice would be to make our workflow accessible to all: we want a workflow so easy to use that researchers in synthetic biology will be excited to make microfluidic chips. We want a workflow that interfaces with fabrication protocols that are low cost, such that even DIY hobbyists could make new chips. We wanted a workflow whose hardware could be fabricated with a 3D printer, and whose software is open source so that the entire synthetic biology community can contribute to new features in Neptune. Further, we wanted to ensure our workflow completely and cleanly integrates with current fabrication methods, so that we are still following current standards.

Open Source Software