Team:BostonU HW/HP/Silver
HUMAN PRACTICES: SILVER
As a hardware team, our vision is to enable synthetic biologists to do better research by providing powerful and easy to use tools that solve common synthetic biology problems. We want to provide tools that accelerate the pace of research, and tools that enable synthetic biologists to push the bounds of what we know is possible.
When we set out to develop Neptune, our goal was not to develop a software tool, nor to build microfluidics, nor to develop original hardware to control these devices. We did all of these things of course, and we are proud of it! But our original goal was much more important:
We set out with the goal of making microfluidics accessible to all researchers. In a way, our goal is to enable the entire synthetic biology to consider microfluidics as their next aproach to an experimental design. We set out to make the entire process of designing, fabricating, and controlling a microfluidic device as easy and intuitive as an Excel spreadsheet, and as low cost as any other piece of lab equipment. We set out to completly remove the barrier of entry for any researchers interested in experimenting with microfluidic devices.
Accessibility, and enabling synthetic biologists to use new and exciting tools, is our goal.
To that end, our approach to human practices in iGEM was very clear: we wanted to explore the role intellectual property practices had in the ecosystem of synthetic biology software and hardware. Software and hardware are invaluable assets to synthetic biologists, and we wanted to know: how do patent practices affect the interaction between these tools, and researchers who want to use these tools? What role do open source software and hardware solutions have in the synthetic biology ecosystem?
As a team, we set out to study intellectual property and the affect it has on synthetic biology tools, and synthetic biology research. We also wanted to make sure that, as we developed Neptune, our workflow was integrated with intellectual property practices that would enable synthetic biologists to use microfluidics; we did not want to develop a workflow that was prohibitive to the communities use.
Now, our contributions toward meeting the silver medal criteria for human practices are threefold:
1) We developed a workflow that is completely open source, and accessible. The tools that we built are obviously open source, but the outside tools used to integrate with our workflow are also open source and accessible.
2) We investigated intellectual property practices in synthetic biology. We found that there was a lot to discuss, and a lot of history to look at too! So we partnered with the BU Foundational Research iGEM team to publish a set of blogs that explore IP practices in synthetic biology.
3) Recognizing the limitations of open source software and hardware, we wanted to ensure Neptune would always remain well documented, with a robust community of researchers who use our software, and developers who contribute to making it a great tool. Thus we put our software under the umbrella of Nona, a open source synthetic biology distributor.
4) Actually, fourfold! We didn’t just stop at exploring intellectual property practices! We wanted to reach out to the public, to educate about synthetic biology and also to expose people to microfluidics. To this end we participated as guest researchers in Building With Biology at the Boston Museum of Science, and we hosted activities for high school students at the Summer Pathways program.
