What We Did

The short answer: everything.

Open-

Source

Mindedness Since we are a relatively new team, acquiring funding hasn't been the easiest task especially in the current economic climate. Even with less than unlimited funding, we were still able to produce quality animations, analyze data efficiently, and tweak images using nothing but free, open-source software. With much of synthetic biology paralleling the open-source movement, we wanted to show that an entire project could be done using nothing but open-source and freeware applications.

GIMP

We used Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) for all of our image editing. This program has a majority of the same features as Adobe Photoshop while being free and lightweight. GIMP even has some functions which haven't appeared in its more expensive counterparts.

www.gimp.org

Blender

Blender is an extremely powerful 3d modeling and animation program. We did all of our 3d modelling and animation using blender. All of the protein structures on our wiki were exported from PyMOL into blender where we animated and rendered them.

www.blender.org

Octave

Octave is a language designed for numerical computations similar to MATLAB. We did all of our data analysis using Octave. This open-source program made sorting through thousands of lines of fluorescence data quick and easy using some simple scripts.

www.gnu.org/software/octave