Team:MichiganState/Survey

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Background

The importance of a well-developed biocontainment system has been in increasing demand due to the rise of synthetic biology. Since this project's focus is creating a biocontainment system that could be implemented in labs, understand where others struggle in biocontainment would be beneficial for us to know so we may try to solve those problems in our system.

Survey Design & Distribution

  • Our survey questions were primarily targeted towards understanding the depth of knowledge iGEM teams have on biocontainment as well as what impacts their ability to create a biocontainment system for their project. We also wanted to identify if there are any struggles that iGEM teams face when trying to implement a biocontainment system in their project. Finally, we requested that the teams provided some background information on their team to see if location, years of experience, team members, etc had any impact on creating a biocontainment system for their project.
  • A majority of our response options were in the form of drop-down responses or multiple choice. Those that were not in this form were short responses and usually reserved for an expansion explanation from a previous questions that was in the form of multiple choice or a drop-down option.
  • We also got feedback on the questions that we included from other iGEM teams, Costa Rica and Maastricht, so that we may have further input on how we should phrase our questions. Before distributing the finished survey, we also applied for and received IRB approval. Our survey was distributed via social media on not only our team's social media, but also the Costa Rica team social media pages since they helped contribute to specific aspects of our survey.

Survey Limitations

Although these survey results helped understand iGEM teams struggles and concerns with biocontainment, it is also important to consider the limitations of this questionnaire. Distribution of this survey was not random, it was voluntary, and only distributed to iGEM teams who saw the social media posts.