We are a group of students that are trying to create a global repository about bacteria, but with different science perspectives in order not only to fully understand their nature but also to allow everyone to have a full suite about what tool can help us to do so.

On the mathematical side, we have develop diferent functions that can emulate and predict bacteria growth and some properties.

On the biological one we have develop full documentation about how to replicate bacteria experiments, information to understand them and biliography to go deeper in the subject.

Furthermore we have develop some functions that allow us to recognise different bacteria colonies from photos that will allow us (and every people) to create live simulations from photos in the future.

Finally we have develop a web app that allow every one to take a brief look in our work and try their own experiments.

In the future we expect to develop this web app and transform it in the first social network to share bacteria experiments around the world between scientist, students, teaches and everyday people. This may be a powerfull tool that may lead to facilitate the biologists work in microbiology (even discover some home-experiments about antibiotics that could discover new ones)

Does it sound exiciting to you? Well, great news: You can follow our science adventures on Twitter!

What?

We live in a world where we have access to new technologies every day. However, all the potential hidden under Computer Science usually goes unnoticed in areas that are not technical at all.

We find that microbiological researching world is getting more relevant and everyone is starting to cite and get interested in this area. Understand it could lead us to a new era due to the fact that we are deeply surrounding by microbes.

From the beginning of our project we saw that mixing tools from every field to experiment on bacteria can make a big difference in their study, even more if we offer a service with all of them and from all possible areas.

How?

Our project consists essentially of 2 interconnected parts:

On one hand we have a repertoire of tools for bacterial growth studies from the point of view of image processing, mathematical prediction and biological experimentation. Knowing what algorithms we should use or what bacteria cultivate was the most difficult task. This is also motivate by the fact that some of them are not usual. 2-dimensional FKPP simulations are rare, for example. And the one we have created can be found at the top 3 in the first page of Google.

All projects are Open Source, so all these tools can be used in academic or social areas, such as citizen laboratories.

Apart from all these free/open tools, we believed that a good way to create a community could be to centralize the prediction and storage service of biological experiments via web. So we create a webapp.

This app will allow you to have information and predictions of experiments accessible to everyone.

Why?

The vision of so many points of view in science can lead to new and exciting discoveries.

This set of tools and information is a small step in collecting information by studying objects, not by scientific branches allowing interaction not only between creators and consumers but also between consumers.

And it is important that this be developed in an open manner, thus facilitating the birth of associated projects or unexpected advances. As our slogan says, it is time for science to evolve, be free and global.

But all of this stuff is new?

Yes, we bring a so fresh product. Social Networks in Science are not new. There exists so many of them but none with our characteristics or potential.

For example, websites like ResearchID, ResearchGate, Mendeley,... are used to create profile of researchers and share their papers.

In the Open Bacteria Project all of this is posible but we can do so much more this is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only we can connect and share papers like in others social networks but we can share our experiments (in images, video, ...with its correspondent processing) and extract information of them in an automatic way. We can also compare the results with mathematical models and develop new mathematical models. This is a big help on researching in microbiology and it favors the open science since the experiments, code and papers will be open and shared with the whole scientific community.

Methodology

All methodology files can be found at our GitHub. Take a look at our Github Guide in "Our project" section to understand how to navigate in our GitHub without getting lost!

What's next?

The Open Bacteria Project is far for its conclusion. That doesn't mean we haven't doneanything, we have done the most difficult part: Begin our journey. However as we were working on this science project we realize that we shouldn't stop here,we must continue in the developping process. We are excited about Impaciencia contest, but we are quite sure TOBP is a real game changer in science

We would like to get some finantiation to set our project online (servers cost money and we don't have much). Futhermore more experiments should be done to adjust at its best our models and prediction, but unfortunately we couldn't make more than one big experiment for this (laboratories at our university are always crowed and materials also cost money).

With all the project set online, we also could begin to accept additions to our database, that could be exponentially valuable for science, and serve to train even more prediction algorithms.

Remeber:

Bacteria evolve, Science too!