The Synaptic Leap

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

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.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

JoVE is an excellent peer reviewed video based open access Journal that is truly open source.

See this blog entry which includes a short trailer and various JoVE related links.

GemIdent in action identifying cancer cells in a IHC-stained lymphnode image

Hi!

My name is Giovanni and I'm a student fo bioinformatics, from Italy.

I'm interested in contributing to the synaptic leap. I've noticed that this website isn't seeing too much activity lately, and I'm sorry for that, but I do believe that the idea of a Scientific Community inspired by the OpenSource one is very good.

There's a new database from WHO for tracking new targets for drug discovery for neglected diseases. Not much there yet, but it's sure to grow.

Mat

There was a report in a UK paper recently about an 'ethical pharmaceutical' approach to the production of new drugs, by the development of a patent-beating formulation of an existing compound. A discussion just started about this over here.

Mat

A conference on open access/public knowledge projects is being held in Vancouver in July:

 http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/

It's interesting that this area has become large/mainstream enough that whole conferences are being devoted to it.

Mat

Hello,

 I'm going to attend XXVI Midwest Enzyme Chemistry Conference
(September 30, 2006, Northwestern U., Chicago; http://www.midwestenzyme.org). If somebody will be there and feels like talking, please drop me a line.

Cheers,

Anatoly

I had the honor and privilige of attending Science Foo Camp at Google last weekend. O'Reilly and Associates, Nature and Google sponsored the event and brought together roughly 200 cross-discipline scientists and open source software geeks from around the world. There was definitely a theme of those invited - open, collaboration, biomedical science, global warming, semantic web...

It was fantastic. I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot. I of course was there talking about The Synaptic Leap. The attached presenentation was my super deck I created before the conference. I didn't present it in whole. I did however talk to people on every topic - on the bus, at the cafe, by the tents... The presentation has comments I made before the conference as well as notes on feedback I gathered - both positive and negative.

tslfoo.pdf 

I encourage you to post additional feedback below.

Cheers!