Yahoo answers- Interact with the President of India

Thats not really a big surprise considering he himself is a scientist, Dr. Abdul Kalam Azad the President of India who is also the commander in chief of the Army,Navy and Airforce of India, and is key force for India’s nuclear and Space power and technology uses, yahoo answer so that he can listen and hear from his people, so what about our scientist ! especially in life sciencs and academicians. Recently I had posted about the similar attempts by US presidentail hopeful’s sudden rush to web2.0. and how youtube is helping the science

Dr. Kalam’s His thought provoking question,  has garnered over 28000 answers in just 30 days. wow thats a response rate you could never expect in any other online forum asking for soutions to a scientific question or problem

chekout more visit his profile at http://in.answers.yahoo.com/my/profile?show=1e6b7ca835ee0cc4185b0ab950476c08aa
Some leading Indian figures like Sri Sri Ravishankar, Kiran Bedi, and Leander Paes have posted answers to Dr. Kalam’s question

less than 10% of people build content in an online community — in this case answer questions. The popular thumb-rule for online participation is 1% visitors would be hard-core contributors, 10% mild contributors, and 90% would be beneficiaries

By 2006 end, Yahoo! Answers had gained over 60 million unique users on a monthly basis

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070112135510AAD7SB8

Microarrays for taxonomics studies

The develpment of barcode microarray may be a subject of debate , but it may hel in transgenomic studies, and would help in finding new avenues for use of microarrays

standardization in microarray analysis software industry

scouting for the right software for the microarray analysis software , kept me thinkng why despite these software being used by scores or scientists no one has come forward to create what can be called as a standard for such software, the confusion rains in this field as one company’s software data do not work with another one and vice versa, For an industry like biology and drug discovery  that is trying to benefit from the knowledge of mathematics statitics and chemistry physics inability to port data across platform is a serious roadblock. there are standards such as MIAMe and MAGE but these are just data standards, not for softwares, I believe ther should be  something similar to ISO standards, SEI CMI etc.

majority of the newsgroup and forums are used by graduate and at times senor researchers to find out which is the best software to be used, I thought of starting a wiki page where researchers can post their comments and rate the products and compare the features against each other,

can open source ideals begin to give a real answer to biotech’s future

would it be possible to adopt the ideals of the open source in microarray development, there has been many research works that can be hailed as open source ideals in the biotechnology space, human genome project can be the perfect example, But apart from the few attempts by academia and non profits institutions there havnt been many attempts to look at this as a way forward, Microarray development can be termed as a lucrative field where such a coalition would accrue great benefits, By releasing the research works for others for free of cost it is possible to bring down the cost of microarray, there is no doubt that it would benefit the new research frontiers such as pharmacogenomics and toxicogenomics, by reducing the cost per array closer to any to other screening test currently adopted in hospitals or used by forensic labs. Microarray can also be used for reducing the costly PCR technique by closing in on a more focused number of genes to amplify from But it would mean that there has to be enough researchers out there who will be buying theses product in the first stage itself so as the company involved i such an audacious attempt would recover its cost and make profits to continue further work, thats a major hurdle to overcome, as custom microarray or at times even the existing one may not be useful to every researcher even if they are working on the same genome for example one person may be in toxicology research and the other in ecology or pure genetics even if they work on same genome the controls required and number of gene of interest would vary vastly across the spectrum, it may take a long time for the open source ideals to bear any fruit in this arena but that may be the way forward to bring meaningful results with less cost, till outsourcing can be a start for all things to come

 Abin paul Xavier

http://www.ocimumbio.com