Collaborations are an important essence of iGEM in particular and science in general. Teams in the past have shown excellent outcomes coming out of collaborations. We realized, however, that there is no user-friendly platform for iGEM teams to access information of other teams’ projects for a possible collaboration..

So, we set up a graphical database of project features of all the iGEM Teams in collaboration with a team of developers at the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaire. The database is called the "Rhizi" and is a real-time collaboration tool whereby a team can share its project details under the following node types, and common nodes between teams are automatically connected. For instance, a team working on lactobacillus plantarum would automatically be connected to all the other teams working on the same organism, and then can share vectors, promoters, protocols, and in general any advice with all these teams.

Node types:

• Team
• Track
• Wet-lab technique
• Computational Technique/Tool
• Organism
• Project Keyword

We developed the structure of a Rhizi document (node types, view modes, features) to suit the particular needs of iGEM and made a short video tutorial explaining the usage of the database, and requested some iGEM teams for testing and feedback on both the tutorial and Rhizi. We re-made the video catering to the feedback and then asked all the iGEM teams to share their project details at Rhizi .

By the wiki-freeze deadline, 22 iGEM teams had shared their project features in the Rhizi thus generating a huge map and we believe that the usefulness of iGEM Rhizi would be more visible in further years as it gains more popularity.

Nodes for the Paris_Bettencourt team in the Rhizi

Clicking on any node highlights all the nodes linked to it
A view of half of the the entire iGEM Rhizi document in the circular layout.