by Megan Palmer (Chair, Insights Steering Committee) and Marc Santolini (Leader, iGEM TIES)

Megan and Marc also gave a session on this topic at iGEM’s 2020 Opening Weekend Festival (YouTube)(Bilibili)

iGEM Insights is an initiative sparked by a growing community of iGEMers and researchers around the world interested in learning about science and engineering through data. Through iGEM Insights, we aim to leverage data from iGEM as a unique open and international testbed to improve both the competition and the practice of synthetic biology (and science and engineering more broadly) beyond the competition. In this post, we will introduce the iGEM Insights initiative, along with ongoing projects, such as the iGEM Team IntEractions Study (TIES) exploring how teams organize their workflow using the new Collaborative Sonar (CoSo) app.

How can we learn from iGEM?

Collaborative learning is at the core of iGEM and the motivation behind the iGEM Insights initiative. Ever since iGEM began over 16 years ago, a growing community of researchers has been interested in how we can learn from iGEM – not just from individual cases and individual projects, but from all the projects that have been done in a year, and from projects across the years. How do we connect the dots? And how do we apply that knowledge so we can begin to both improve iGEM and to help others learn to do ambitious things in the spirit of iGEM?

Global distribution of iGEM teams through 2019

Through iGEM Insights, we aim to launch a community that is interested in how to understand and improve iGEM through more systematic data-informed and data-driven analysis. Because many people have already been working on these types of projects, much of our focus is on recognizing a growing community and their contributions. And we are eager to have you, iGEMers participating in the iGEM 2020 season, contribute in whatever ways you are most excited about.

iGEM as an Innovation Model

iGEM is a model of innovation that goes beyond science and engineering, and anyone who has participated in iGEM can see that the competition has many special attributes that make it unique and interesting. iGEM has the benefit of numbers, with more than 3,000 teams participating in a very international setting. There have been many inspiring anecdotes from people participating in iGEM over the years, but we are interested in using the data generated during iGEM to better understand and gain quantitative insights.

Team network example: team members (yellow), lab book sections (blue)

Our interest in iGEM may be seen as part of a movement called the “Science of Science” which is a data revival of meta science investigation and epidemiological investigation (for a review of this field, check out Fortuno et al., 2018). We are interested in the question: Can we learn from iGEM about how science occurs in open collaborative spaces?

Examples of teams working with iGEM data over the years includes:

The 2013 Paris-Bettencourt iGEM team, winners of the iGEM 2013 Grand Prize who conducted a gender study as part of their iGEM human practices. They not only shared the data that they generated, but also catalyzed some policy changes within iGEM considering the results of their analysis.

The 2016 Waterloo iGEM team conducted an investigation of collaboration between iGEM teams. They also made the data available, which has enabled further studies on the impact of changes in iGEM policies.

The 2015 NTNU Trondheim iGEM team created a matchmaking algorithm to match the abstracts between iGEM team so that teams could find another team to collaborate with based on the fact that they are very similar, or very different, from one another. They made their code available on GitHub and maintain the iGEM Matchmaker Tool online.

And use of iGEM data coordinated by iGEM Headquarters includes:

iGEM InterLab Measurement Study – a multi-year effort to identify and correct the sources of systematic variability in synthetic biology measurements (see Beal et al. 2020 and Beal et al. 2016 for more details)

Assembling a community

The iGEM Insights initiative began with an Inaugural Symposium held in 2017. The purpose of the symposium was to assemble people from iGEM HQ alongside researchers and practitioners working with iGEM data to see if we could create a community effort to enable systematic analysis of iGEM operations and impact.

The first iGEM Insights gathering in Boston, 2017

Through the iGEM Insights initiative, we seek to ask and answer questions such as:

–      How do teams build upon each other’s work over the years?
–      How does team composition influence collaboration and learning?
–      What enables teams to conduct more creative interdisciplinary projects?
–      What cultivates best practices in safety and ethics in novel research areas?
–      What leads to team success in the competition?
–      What makes projects survive after the competition?
–      What impact does iGEM have on individuals, organizations and regions?

We encourage you to visit the iGEM Insights webpage to check out the collection of resources and to learn about how to get involved.

iGEM TIES (Team IntEractions Study)

iGEM TIES is a research study that explores how iGEM team interactions, diversity and trans-disciplinarity impact the global performance of iGEM teams and the learning experience of the students. With more than 3,000 teams from around the world participating over the past 16+ years, iGEM is a testbed to understand collaborations. Through the iGEM wikis, it is possible to understand how team members interact and organize themselves inside a team. We can also trace how teams collaborate with each other through the team collaboration network. The BioBricks that are produced by iGEM teams can be reused and combined with other BioBricks, creating a “citation network” that reveals combination strategies and behaviors of innovating in that project space. And finally, we have the performance measures of iGEM medals and prizes that help us understand the accomplishments of the teams.

This year, we are inviting all iGEM 2020 teams to participate in iGEM TIES. To learn more and be part of this network, we invite you to register at https://igem-ties.info, where you will find more information and can download our new CoSo app. Participation is completely voluntary, and all data will be anonymized and kept secured on a server. After the wiki freeze, we will provide a report summarizing some general analytics of your iGEM team (networks of interaction, number of interactions, etc.) so that you will have something to show in time for your presentation at the Giant Jamboree!

Join our network!

We’re very excited to open iGEM Insights, including iGEM TIES, to the teams participating in the iGEM 2020 competition. All teams – with or without access to a laboratory – are invited to participate. Because many teams are unable to access the wet lab, they are doing some amazing work in software and informatics that interfaces with their projects. This allows teams to think about how to connect the types of projects and data across the years, and helps us tell this story of what we have all done together in a different way. We are really interested in seeing what you (this year’s teams) consider to be the types of questions that most excite you.

iGEM Insights is not just about technology, and not just about data; it’s about people and this valuable competition. A critical part of iGEM Insights is to take the values of iGEM, including respect, and apply them to the analyses that we do. The iGEM Insights committee is here to help you not just understand how to interface with tools, but also how to think about doing these types of analyses in ways that can be fair and respectful, and contribute to a much broader enterprise. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at insights@igem.org to learn more about how to contribute to the iGEM Insights initiative. You can also send an email to igem-ties@cri-paris.org to find out more about participating in iGEM TIES.

We wish you the very best in this exceptional iGEM 2020 season!