In silico experiments
Notes:
Mining Research knowledge
. The shift to ìin silicoî experimentation requires finding and weaving services. The community is embracing web services coupled with workflow to do this. Web services will be a major consumer of web-based semantics.
- Scientific discovery is personal & collaborative
Hunter gathering -> harvesting
- Ad-hoc solutions, people-powered
- - Non-prescriptive - Palette
Deriving & process recovery on failure
In silico experiments are like engineering designs that we can share
a. do an experiment generating clones gene sequences
b. analyse the sequences using BLAST against a variety of human genomic and EST databases (parallel flow)
c. gather together the information --> one result is a human gene without a previous yeast equivalent
d. query a number of databases to find the function of this gene
(integration of 3 databases) and discover that it is a transcription factor
e. interrogate the literature pointed to by the database results in d shows that the factor can control genes related to the yeast gene of interest. More literature discover that the controlling DNA sequence targetted by the human transcription factor ide
f. collate the results and add them to a public repository ...
If one of the EST databases changes, then this entire experiment might
produce different results. Suppose the one of the original sequences
used in the BLAST search was incorrect (finger trouble in the
experiment) then we want to trace back the new data we generated at the
end of this process and correct.