1 Million DNA Shares: Cambridge Nonprofit Akin To Science Airbnb Approaches Milestone | CommonHealth

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-08-22

Summary:

"Back in the early 2000s, when Melina Fan was in graduate school at Harvard, her research on diabetes and obesity ran into some frustrating snags. She needed certain plasmids — circular bits of DNA — to study genes involved in how cells burn energy, but when she reached out to 20 different labs for them, she hit roadblocks. "About half of them didn't get back to me," she recalls, "and those who did, it took a long time to get the materials, and sometimes they weren't correct."

Fan didn't blame the labs; their job was research, not shipping out packages. But there was clearly a problem that was slowing down science. After she graduated in 2004, she co-founded Addgene, a nonprofit repository that gathers and sends out plasmids, those critical bits of DNA, to scientists who need them. Fast forward to 2018, and any day now, Addgene expects to have cause for a big celebration: "Addgene is about to hit its 1 millionth plasmid shared," Fan says. "This is a major milestone for the organization, and for science in general, because this marks 1 million plasmids that scientists have actually been sharing with each other."..."

Link:

http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2018/08/20/addgene-million-dna-shared

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.open_science oa.stem oa.genomics oa.specimens oa.green oa.milestones oa.repositories

Date tagged:

08/22/2018, 11:46

Date published:

08/22/2018, 07:47