Aliquot

Aliquot is dedicated to help scientists easily locate biological agents from others labs and facilitate a trade.

Comment

Inspiration

Aliquot aims to facilitate the transfer of biological reagents between thousands of laboratories and their researches. Aliquot is dedicated to ensuring that scientists can easily locate biological agents that other labs have already produced, while also enabling communication to facilitate the trade. As a result, the medical field would save millions of dollars each year while also increasing the rate that medical research is done.

The inspiration for Aliquot originated from a passionate member of our development team who works in the Oncology field. When examining the bioinformatics data of cancer patients over the course of a year, we notice a weakness in the field of research. There are significant numbers of times when research papers that can help a particular patient’s health are published a few months after the patient dies. Delay in publication can be attributed to the inefficiency caused by the lack of infrastructure that allows for labs to share biological material. Aliquot resolves this issue by creating a no-paywall, e-laboratory system where PI’s (Principle Investigators) can personally input and share their publications and reagents.

What it does

  1. Facilitating the sharing of biological reagent between laboratories
  2. Promoting improved intra-lab communication
  3. Providing an “e-laboratory” system where laboratories can model and create their own pages and documentation of their work

How we built it

Coding began, 36 hours passed, and a product mysteriously emerged from the oblivions of tears, born from essence of our life discarded in a marathon of sleepless nights.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Implementing OneNote API with Ruby on Rails without exemplary examples in the aforementioned language
  2. Creating an Advanced Search with little to no experience in search
  3. Integration of issues and generic bugs

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Built from the ground up with: -OneNote API Integration -Bootstrap API Integration
  2. Ruby on Rails, JS, CSS, & HTML -Fluid and Responsive User Interface (Scratch Built) -Material Transfer Documentation -Successfully integrating all our work through Git and BitBucket

What we learned

The beauty of a Hackathon is the environment of intense collective collaboration where diverse members complement and push each other to learn new languages and frameworks within a time limit. From the Bootstrap framework to Ruby on Rails each of our members brought our own expertise to the table and learned from the ground up in a different field from one another. We each learned much from the process of building a dynamic repository coded in Ruby incorporating the OneNote API and Azure Cloud.

What's next for Aliquot

-Integration of already existing data into our databases. -Use machine learning to predict the future demand for certain bacterial cultures and viral tier -Enhancing our user-friendly interface -Improve the efficiency of search -Partnering with companies and organizations, i.e. NIH, to expand our database

Share this project:

Updates