By Kevin E. Noonan --
On a website that has been active only since late last year, scientist and web guru Moshe Pritsker is collecting videos demonstrating an ever-growing collection of scientific experiments as a way of providing the hardest part of making a new protocol work in practice: actually seeing it work. As these techniques get more and more complicated, and concomitantly as correctly performing the technique involves more nuances that are difficult to disseminate in a written protocol (or worse, the "Methods" section in a scientific journal), actually being able to see someone perform the experiment, complete with commentary, promises to become an invaluable resource.
Pritsker (at left) is a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and previously worked in Ihor Lemischka's lab at Princeton University. The purpose of the site, according to its "About" page, is to provide an "open access" tool for promoting transparency and reproducibility is increasingly complex biological experiments.
There have been four issues so far; in the latest issue, videos are presented for large-scale screening of metagenomic libraries and establishing primary neuronal colonies from Drosophila pupae. Prior posts include methods for preparing hematopoietic stem cells from mouse embryonic stem cells and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis.
Dr. Pritsker has assembled an impressive editorial board supporting this site, including professors from Princeton, Harvard, USC, and the National Institutes of Health in the US, and Kyoto University and the University of Zurich, among others.
This is a free site, and e-mail subscriptions are available for free on the site for receiving monthly updates.
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