Possible Ideas for Citizen Science Project

Question

[omey.salvi]

I'm a programmer with free time. I want to contribute to the world. I understand some biology from high school. I want to create a citizen science project that contributes to science.

Are there any problems that can be solved in DNA analysis or biotechnology that require human eyes and brains?

Classification problems, pattern matching, puzzle-solving...anything like that works.

Thank you

Answer 1

[Charles Warden]

I think comparing genomics results for different companies is important, although it may not be exactly "Citizen Science"

People can already participate in things like the FDA MedWatch, PatientsLikeMe, and/or the Personal Genome Project (where I have provided by own page, for an example).

While I hope there can eventually be a more user-friendly way to provide "real world" data, some amount of programming experience is probably helpful if helping Family and Friends upload data to precisionFDA.

For example, I have shared a combination of custom analysis and reports from the precisionFDA website here:

http://cdwscience.blogspot.com/2019/05/precisionfda-and-custom-scripts-for.html