Collaboration with the Freiburg_Bioware team

Since our university has two teams participating at iGEM this year our collaboration partner was quickly found. The Bioware team asked us to help them make a sponsoring Website to collect funds for our two projects. Over the time we got to know the members of the Bioware team, because we were working in the same place: While the Bioware team worked in a lab we were sitting in the associated kitchen and common room working on our code.
We got to be friends and hang out together in the evenings. Free time activities were e.g. the canoeing tour on the river Rhine or the BBQ on the top of the biology building.
Since the Bioware team took care about the sponsoring and organized the journey to iGME for both of our teams, they spared our small team a lot of work and we could concentrate better on our work.
When the complexity of the project became bigger, we needed help from potential users. The Bioware team answered all our questions and gave us proposals to improve the program outputs.

The primer designer program

In the summer the Bioware theam asked us to create a program for primer design. Until then they were using a spread-sheet calculation program to find primers for their PCRs, although the process can be automated. The primerdesign program made this task much easier for them. Furthermore a primer designer robot seemed like the perfect candidate for our growing set of add-on robots and so both our teams profited from this collaboration. Read their part of the story on their wiki!