This section intends to illustrate the framework used by the Imperial College iGEM Team in 2006. Over the summer 2006, for our first participation to iGEM, we wanted to explore how far we could push the traditional engineering approach in order to deal with a Synthetic Biology project.
Without constraining the students to a particular system, we wanted them to follow an engineering development cycle. As it is true for traditional engineering project management, it was thought to promote collaborative work, traceability and quality control throughout the all project.
The engineering development cycle was based on 5 steps : Specifications, Design, Modelling, Implementation and Testing/Validation
In the following sections we will discuss the different steps of the methodology, illustrating them with documents produced by the students. We will also point out some tools that we used to accomplish each task. Finally, we will give feedbacks from our first experience.