The iGEM spirit of open and collaborative work and the philosophy of building something for other teams encouraged us to build tools that can be used for further research and development. We have imbibed this spirit in almost all aspects of our work, and have something in each area that can be used by future teams in their projects. Here is a brief summary of our key contributions to the iGEM community, science and society:
PAM-Finder tool
Our Team developed a web tool which offers an improved user experience that streamlines the gRNA design process. The web-app helps in detecting PAM sites, and designing gRNAs for large DNA sequences for a range of CRISPR reactions involving different Cas Proteins in an efficient manner. Since iGEM promotes open science practices, all the codes will be available on Github, which will make it easier for future iGEM teams who wish to build upon our work and embed it in new workflowsFor further details, check out our Software Page.
Education and Awareness tools
Education and awareness tools on Cervical cancer testingWe have also contributed to a science journal with an article on cervical cancer and emphasized the need for preventative testing of HPV in collaboration with different iGEM teams across the globe.
Link to the journal:
https://static.igem.wiki/teams/4434/wiki/an-inside-look-at-igem-2022-compressed.pdf
Machine Learning model
Analyzing the editing results of CRISPR reactions is difficult, and it is sometimes underappreciated, overlooked, and performed incorrectly since there were previously not many software tools available to make insertion and deletion (indel) analysis easy for scientists. Most of the available CRISPR analysis methods are either complicated, expensive or simply not good enough to be informative because they do not measure the indel frequency. Our team developed a deep learning model based on a Convolution Neural Network algorithm to predict the indel frequency of CRISPR/Cas12a reactions from a training dataset of 12000 gRNA sequences.Check out our approach and model development process at model page.
