The Synaptic Leap

We're drawing up a contract (with WHO and the ARC) to cover our new grant (and hence this site). Our business office would like to know which Creative Commons licence is most suitable. I was assuming Attribution 3.0 unported, since this allows sharing and remixing under attribution. On the face of it, a better alternative is Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, since this also requires that anyone using the research has to distribute their own work under a similar licence.

We've been successful in securing a large government grant with an open source component. The 3-year project concerns the enantioselective synthesis of PZQ for a low price, with the World Health Organisation as partner. (PDF of the Uni Sydney outcomes is here). The funding comes from the Australian Research Council (the main government funding agency in Australia). We wrote the proposal emphasising the possibilities inherent in the open source approach to doing science, and we're very pleased that this was seen as positive by an official grant-funding agency. The funding will allow us to increase our efforts on using TSL to drive our project forward much faster.

The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has funded two centers for conducting structural gemomics studies on Infectious disease organisms.

There are two centers, one called SSGCID (Seattle Structurals Genomics Center for Infectious Diseases) run by Seattle Biomedical Research Institue (SBRI). Another is CSGID (Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases).

Both centers are seeking target suggestions from the worldwide community. Make target requests at:

http://www.ssgcid.org/home/Community.asp

-Bartrum

Not sure where this should go - I have v. limited experience here and it is not in my profile, so I say this and nip off. Anyway - hats off for a fine concept and the best of luck

The idea I want to pass on here is one I try on commercial research but they are cautious due to deniability and litigation.

I propose that you set up mechanisms to recieve actual structural files when you discuss  chemical or biological structure related questions. The point being that you can forever associate the comments or threads or blog entries (whatever) with that structure file. In this way you can later perform all manner of searches and comparisons with the stored structural data and also serve up human comments related to those structure entry appearances. Actually what you are doing is storing human information which is difficult to search massively (so far) with a well constrained concept which can very easily be power searched (structure graphs). Structural files in information speak are very highly specific and even with very large collections of files the power of the query launguage (structure query) can allow you to produce query results with very little junk - at least on the structural side (human related comments can of course be junk). Downstream - with more data there are manifold possibilities to mine the structure files to generate knowledge and if all goes well the power of the text handling side shows much promise to multiply the value of the human comments

On the discussion enhancing side I am sure having, at least, images of structures and possibly 3D binding pocket views would be cool - especially if you can save the view and publish it (say as a gif) and attach it to your posts/blog to support your comments, of course as a structure file opponents are at liberty to open it, re-evaluate and suggest alternatives - especially if they can open the file from your wewbsite and be looking exactly at the view and trimmings. If we factor virtual discovery surfaces in here then we could multiply the power of the forum massively

Another interesting PZQ paper has come out of the cell biology group at the CNR in Rome, concerning the mode of action of PZQ. Using radioactive calcium, the group have demonstrated that calcium influx in itself is not enough to kill parasites. Pre-incubation with cytochalasin D promoted calcium influx but protected the worms from PZQ's schistosomicidal effects.

Deepak Singh has very recently started:-

Thanks to the lovely spam bots, we had to activate our captcha module recently for new posts. Sadly most people (including me) couldn't read the characters, so we switched it off. While we work out what to do next, posts will temporarily be approved the old way. Hopefully the delay to posts being published should be minimal.

Below are a few common tools for scientists studying schistosomiasis.

• WHO fact sheet on schistosomiasis 
• TDR on schistosomiasis
• CDC on schistosomiasis
• Wikipedia overview of schistosomiasis
• Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

If you know of additional tools and resources that should be added to this page, please login and post a comment to this page to let me know about it.

Cheers! Mat