Problem

Much of the knowledge produced by biological research is passed down by oral tradition.

This makes it difficult for newcomers to enter the field.

Solution: OpenWetWare

OpenWetWare's contributions

1. Democratizing and disseminating content generation
2. Digitization of biological knowledge, as it is generated

Courses on OpenWetWare

Student contributions to OpenWetWare

Model Construction and Documentation

• YeastPheromoneModel.org -- Ty Thomson, MIT
• Agile Informatics project -- Jeremy Muhlich, HMS/CDP; Brian Joughin, MIT/ICBP

Models Are Poorly Communicated

Knowledge generated during model building is lost!

It is difficult to:

• construct a new model
• build on published models
• evaluate published models
• involve experimentalists

What About MIRIAM, SBML, etc?

• MIRIAM - Minimum Information Requested in the Annotation of Biochemical Models
• SBML - Systems Biology Markup Language

OK for publishing, but too complicated for discovery!

Can we design something more "agile" while utilizing and respecting the established standards?

YeastPheromoneModel.org

YeastPheromoneModel.org

OpenWetWare's success

• 2,800 contributors
• 100 labs
• 1.5 million pageviews per month
• 275,000 sessions per month

http://openwetware.org