Team:BU Wellesley Software/Notebook/DougNotebook

This is my notebook. This is my voice on TV.

Anyway, welcome to my single notebook entry. Here we go. Team #3. Lucky #3. Numero tres. Third times the charm. Etc. This is my third time running an iGEM team in case you could not guess. My first two teams were at UC Berkeley. I was a post doc then. I had more time then. I had more energy then. This year, now that I am a big time professor at Boston University, I figured I should run a team here. How hard could it be? Heck, it is going to be cheap since it is at MIT (cue humorous "Wa Wa" sound as I learn about regional jamboree format). I can handle a team of 10 students at BU. No problem I said. Needless to say this was another massive undertaking. I couldn't have done it without my other instructors (Orit Shaer, Traci Haddock, Swapnil Bhatia, Megan Strait, and Suma Jaini). THANKS A TON! Now that it is winding down and I can say without hesitation that it was totally worth it and I would do it again (doh!). So, why I am excited about our team?!?!?!

1. Our team is joint with Wellesley College. A year or so ago, I stumbled across this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf-zMFdlqQ4 (YouTube video). I thought it was really cool. I figured if we could get a great HCI project combined with the Clotho project it could address many of the concerns folks had about the learning curve associated with software tools for synthetic biology. I don't think we have this completely settled yet by any means but at least this project was able to get that collaboration started and we have established a way to collaborate.

2. We really revamped the Clotho core and main dashboard. Clotho has a completely new look and feel in 2011. Not only that but we have cleaned up much of the internal code and migrated the core to a new repository.

3. This project has a COMPLETE WET LAB COMPONENT. This was a great way to bootstrap my new lab at BU as well as get real wetlab experimentalists to start using Clotho. Not only did this show that my lab could assembly new BioBrick parts but we also were able to get our entire software flow (specification, design, and assembly) fully working.

4.Cool application. By partnering with Suma Jaini and the Galagan Lab here at BU, we were able to find a great application for our research by studying Tuberculosis.