Team:Michigan Software/Contribution
Overview
Background
Two years ago the Michigan Software 2014 team began development of ProtoCat 1.0. Like many innovative ideas, ProtoCat began because of a problem. Studieshave estimated that only 10-25% of published scientific results are reproducible. A 2014 survey conducted by the Michigan Software team confirmed that the repeatability problem exists in synthetic biology, with every scientist surveyed reporting prior struggles with replicating protocols. The majority of these scientists indicated unclear language and missing steps are the greatest contributors to the irreproducibility of synthetic biology protocols. A second study conducted by the 2015 Michigan Software team only further confirmed the sentiments of the first study. These issues are what ProtoCat has been designed to solve.
Solution
Every respondent of the second survey indicated that they would use a database to browse and download protocols, with over 85% indicating that they would upload and maintain their own protocols if such a site existed. ProtoCat 4.0 is a free database of crowd sourced protocols designed to make existing protocols more repeatable and enable more accurate computational models of biological systems. We believe this can most efficiently be accomplished with a commitment to open source protocols and a broader more active community of digital troubleshooters. ProtoCat 4.0 works to establish such a community by giving anyone with an internet connection or smartphone access to a repository of synthetic biology protocols collected from all over the world. Additionally, ProtoCat 4.0 encourages the development of higher quality, more repeatable protocols by allowing users to document, rate, review, and edit existing methods.
ProtoCat 4.0
ProtoCat 4.0 is optimized for collaboration among users and offers the best user experience we have developed. Features like Protometrics, visual protocol history and protocol favoring each help achieve the best version of a protocol. ProtoCat 4.0 now provides quantitative metrics and a visual representation of branch history in order to provide researchers with feedback and allow users to easily locate versions of protocols. Users can also favorite protocols they like to identify the best ones and quickly relocate them.
The user experience is another aspect that has been improved in ProtoCat 4.0. We've added features such as threaded comments, notifications, group accounts and a new chat system called ProtoChat in this year’s version of ProtoCat. Now users can easily communicate through commenting on protocols or chatting and have access to a larger database of protocols through our protocol.io import tool. Some additional features include password recovery, notifications, a better search algorithm and protocol drafting which allows users to start and finish a new protocol at their convenience. These are all important improvements that contribute to a better user experience and our best version of ProtoCat.
