PennApps

Members of Penn iGEM participated in PennApps, the premiere college hackathon, attended by approximately 1,000 student hackers. Over the course of 48 hours, teams work to design an app from start to finish. At the demo round, all the teams – over 200 in total – present their apps to fellow hackers, interested students, and representatives from the tech industry. The Penn iGEM team represented synthetic biology at an event predominantly attended by computer science students, and PennApps attendees were excited to see a new computer program with a scientific application.

Our booth is busy! Danny and Josh simultaneously present MaGellin to two interest onlookers.

Josh shows a presentation on the math behind MaGellin.

Our final product was a gel analysis app which automates the process of interpreting DNA bands run through gel electrophoresis. This app, entitled MaGellin, complements our digestion assay and reports the extent of on-target and off-target methylation, greatly simplifying data analysis for the experimenter. Unlike other gel analysis programs, MaGellin interprets plasmid sequences, understands methylation patterns, and assesses targeted methylation based on a gel image.

Learn more about MaGellin on our software page.

MaGellin is a robust platform that can easily be adjusted for other gel analysis problems, such as interpreting COBRA and quantifying PCR yields. Our code is open-source, and we encourage researchers to adapt it to various needs. We would like to collaborate with other iGEM teams to expand the range of gel analysis tasks MaGellin performs.

Retrieved from "http://2013.igem.org/Team:Penn/PennApps"