Why to use standard biological protocols?

Welcome to the new standard biological protocols website. This site will focus mainly on constructing new standards for writing, viewing and deploying biological protocols.

You are probably asking what standards I am talking about and what exactly my agenda is.Well, as a biologist I find myself over and over again chasing and learning new lab methods every day, currently there is a large literature pile of countless protocols coming from many different origins like articles, books, technical papers, companies’ brochures and manuals.

The facts are that although the protocols are out there and are easy to reach, they are written in a very diverse ways and so, the case is that with every new protocol you find, you need to struggle all over again with the writing and the terminology, and often, just understanding the protocol’s structure takes a long time.

Constructing a new standard to write and present biological procedures will provide the best solution to rapidly understand new protocols which are written in a familiar way, and use a known convention.

In addition, the best place to put protocols today must be online. The internet has become the number 1 information resource available, and the most prominent way by which people, including scientists, search for information. As such, making biological protocols more standard will ease the way computer algorithms can search and sort biological methods, and make the search for known methods much easier and efficient.

Making these methods more understandable to computers will lead to more sophisticated seeking practices that can save a lot of time, picking the right procedure to the right task. Moreover, by making bio protocols accessible to computer software, we can open a new research horizons for bioinformatics scientists and system biologists that would be able to build new algorithms that can compare different experiments, by analyzing the experimental procedure, and the results.  Making so, will aid the currently deep problem of data mining of articles which looks impossible at present.  

Finally, as biological protocols become more and more standard and largely used by everyone, making them more standardized will offer a way to automate these procedure easily, and aid to replace the laborious daily tasks with robots, that will free the time to the researchers to  invest in learning and thinking and not with repeating the same procedure over and over again.

In the next posts I’ll start to discuss in details how do I think that protocol standards should look like, and start building examples of well known procedures. I’ll be glad to any comment about my protocols, and ways to improve them. I planning to built a new application to standardize protocols in the future. 

Dror.

~ by drohilm on June 9, 2007.