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. Studies have 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 last year's 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 3.0 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 3.0 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 3.0 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 experinece we have developed. We've added features such as threaded comments, notifications, protocol favoriting, and a new chat system called ProtoChat in this years verions of ProtoCat. Now users can communicate through commenting and chatting to make improvements on existing protocols or favorite one they like to quickly relocate it. ProtoCat also recieved a password recover system, notifications, and a better search algorithm to search more fields of a protocol. In addition, users can now create drafts of a protocol which allows them to start and finish a new protocol at their convienience. These are are all important features that contribute to a better user experience and our best version of ProtoCat.