Team:Aachen/Practices/tubefront/Survey


Introduction

How do iGEM teams usually organize their wetlab work? Could tubefront be deployed to other laboratories?

We have asked other teams to answer several questions on wetlab organization. The results indicate that there could not be more diversity between teams. Some already have certain organization systems that they are happy with, but many have problems or don't have a good system yet.

Demographics

In total 32 teams participated in the survey. Most of them (88 %) were European or Asian teams.

Aachen tubefront survey teamsize.png
Distribution of Wetlab Team Size
Most iGEM teams usually work with wetlab crews of around 9 people. Some teams have scaled up to more than 15 or even more than 20 people.

As team size increases, the number of samples in the freezers go up to. When we did the survey in July/August, some teams had already accumulated more than 1500 samples.

Aachen tubefront survey samples.png
Distribution of Total Sample Amounts
When the survey was conducted, many teams had less than 100 samples. At the same time most of the teams were scaling up and kept more than 500 or even more than 1500 samples.

Freezer Organization Performance

While 72 % of the teams are able to get a sample in less than a minute, only 22 % are able to achieve the same performance in the theoretical scenario of the tube being not were expected. Half of the participants indicated that they search for more than 2 minutes and sometimes for more than five minutes when they do not find a sample right away.

Documentation Strategies

Almost two thirds of the teams use handwritten (38.9 %) or Word (24.1 %) documents for the documentation of their wetlab work. 18.6 % of the teams that participated in our survey used a wiki-based documentation system. Among another 18.5 % did not use a text- or wiki-based system, the lab management software labguru was most popular.

Aachen PracticesTubefrontSurveyDoc.png
Popularity of different documentation strategies
Documentation strategies are very different between teams. Both 'old school' and 'new fancy stuff' technologies are widely used.

Conclusion

From write-in-questions, we have condensed the following advices for newcomer iGEM teams:

  • think of organization rules before starting in the lab
  • use a centralized system and enforce the rules
  • get rid of old samples that are not longer relevant
  • connect your sample labels with your documentation
  • involve everyone with the sample storage rules
  • don't forget important information like date, concentration, name, strain...

Especially for teams that are already using Wikis to document their work, we recommend our new sample management system at tubefront.com because it helped us to avoid chaos-driven frustration and increase our wetlab efficiency.



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