Can Bioinfo Projects Grow On Large Social Networks?

Question

[Aleksandr Levchuk]

Imagine Facebook going into Bioinformatics - getting hundreds of millions of users collaborating with friends to solve real-world problems. What type of projects can grow on such a large social network of individuals who mostly don't know much biology and programming?

The already has been a question about existing crowdsourcing projects in bioinformatics. The Multiple Sequence Alignment video game Phylo was one of the answers but it does not take advantage of the social aspect.

I'm not so much interested in existing implementations but rather I would like imagine some collaborations in the scale of 100s of millions of active users and 10s of social connections per user.

[Aleksandr Levchuk]

No one suggested a project that is not yet implemented :(

[zarash]

Great idea, should be implemented

Answer 1

[Thaman]

I believe http://www.myexperiment.org/ got a big chance

Answer 2

[Hranjeev]

I don't know about the exposure of this project - FoldIt. But it's really cool.

Answer 3

[Sean Davis]

https://www.23andme.com/ ?

Answer 4

[Leonor Palmeira]

Well, from a strict logical point of view, the main issue would be that it should be something where everyone can contribute without the need for much knowledge.

With a worldwide social network, it would be great to use the fact that people are in different parts of the planet to build the project on that. The main problem of course, being that, if you're not targeting the "BioPunk" community, you will not get any wet-lab data at all. So classical bioinformatics on sequencing stuff or such are typically out of the question.

So I see a project where people contribute something easily (text, photos, ...) from their own part of the globe, and we would build some statistical analyses maybe based on image analysis tools or something in the likes to draw some meaning out of it.

Of course I'm only talking of what seems feasible, not of what topic would be interesting.

Answer 5

[Gjain]

this project is taking to the personal level http://www.personalgenomes.org/

Answer 6

[Mary]

You could take advantage of the BioPunk community as a set of prepared minds with networks to do some things. In fact, there may already be nascent projects there to support.

But there's another project on microbial samples done with citizen science that I was remembering--could really have a nice bioinformatics component. But I can't remember its name. It will come to me and I'll edit this....need more coffee first.

Here's one, but it isn't the one I was thinking of: Thermophiles Lurking in your Basement

Also not the one, but new to me: RNA World

Answer 7

[raunakms]

Open Source Drug Discovery project is one among them !!!