About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Every day, approximately 3,000 new scientific articles are published in biomedical journals, or two articles every minute! Studies show that scientists spend more than 30% of their work hours searching for scholarly publications that are relevant to their work. In our research team alone, we have encountered this problem during our bachelor, Master’s and PhD studies, and we are certain many Microryza users have as well.

For this project, we will to combine literature searching with scientific illustration. Users will see interactive diagrams of stem cell biology in health and disease through which they can access science papers simply by clicking on part of an infographic.

What is the significance of this project?

Our team works in the field of regenerative medicine, i.e., stem cell biology and tissue engineering. You might have heard of those terms in the context of personalized medicine, or efforts to make new organs in a petri dish. This fast-paced field produces thousands of new publications each month. How do stem-cell researchers keep track of relevant studies and maintain a grasp of the big picture?

These questions are important not only for stem-cell scientists, but also students studying stem cell biology, as well as members of the public who wish to get the scientific facts behind the controversies in the media over stem cells. Most importantly, medical doctors need to get relevant information on stem cells - doctors around the world are injecting patients with stem cells at an ever-increasing rate, but almost none of those doctors have received any training in stem cells at all. The results of this project can provide a fast and efficient way to search for stem cell-related publications from the largest biomedical databases, e.g., PubMed. The need for a fast and easy way to stay on top of the latest trends in stem cell research is more critical now than ever since the ban on the use of federal funds for experimenting with human embryonic cells was lifted. We believe that a crowd-sourced research catalog and PDF organizer (similar to Mendeley) specialized for regenerative medicine is desperately needed, especially one which presents the research papers using the user-friendly interactive infographics.

What are the goals of the project?

We are combining standard scientific search (like on Pubmed) with interactive scientifically-accurate illustrations. This means that when you search for “embryonic stem cell,” you will get a detailed diagram which shows human (by default, but you can choose other species too) embryonic cell and the other cells it differentiates into - in normal conditions. You can also select the “pathology” filter - that leads to another diagram, showing e.g., formation of leukemia stem cells. You can also choose the type of organ and/or tissue you are interested in. In each diagram, you can click on any cell and you will get the list of research papers describing the particular cell. You will also have the option to select open-access papers with free PDFs (like on Google Scholar). You can download PDFs directly through our application, and you can even use your own tags to label each paper. We will offer the reference manager as well. In addition, you can upload your PDF and use our application to share it (similar to Mendeley). You can upload your own protocol for cell culture or similar techniques and get comments from other users. You can also use our application to make your own diagram using our cellular illustrations. Such diagrams can be downloaded and used in Powerpoint presentations.

We have capable developers, biology experts and a user-experience designer in the team who work on developing the listed features. The costs that we still need to cover are for the cloud computing platform and data storage fees.