BioStrike

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

= Open Antibiotics Discovery, project for open antibiotics development

URL = https://www.brmlab.cz/project/biolab/biostrike

Description

" Global open biology project supporting the ideals of open science, in which we screen soil bacteria, such as Actinomyces, Streptomyces and Micromonospora for antibiotic properties and to explore the user experience of sharing and discussing open data. It is initiated by DIYbio Waag in 2012 during the first DIYBIO Europe meeting in Paris (Dec 2012) and developed into a global project in October 2013 during a workshop in the Lorentz center in Leiden. It is a part of larger DIYBIO Europe project called BugID on bioprospecting of soil bacteria. The implementation started in October 2013 in a workshop called Innoculab session, by the Waag Society Open Wetlab and BiologiGaragen during the Re-new Festival in Copenhagen Biologigaragen.

Antibiotics have saved millions of lives over the last century. However, many microbes have evolved new mechanisms to withstand these once powerful medicine.

Participate in the BioStrike challenge to hunt for new antibiotics and learn about microbiology starting in your own backyard and kitchen.

There are microbes all around us and everywhere on the planet. They are constantly competing and battling to survive and evolve. Some microbes produces compounds that are toxic to other microorganisms, and these compounds can be used as antibiotics in medicine. The microbes and antibiotics are different all over the world and also depending on what the microbes are growing on, what medium. We invites individuals, high schools and communities to participate in the search for new antibiotic producing microorganisms. It’s up to the participants to find the optimal conditions and measure the capability of their strain to inhibit the growth of the reference strain. The results and strains will be collected and ranked on a global ladder. The data will be openly peer-reviewed by the organizing community. " (https://www.brmlab.cz/project/biolab/biostrike)

Status

By Pieter van Boheemen, Waag Society's Open Wetlab:

Topics being discussed around June 2014:

"- Global antibiotics abuse in medicine and animal farming

- Lack of incentive to investigate / develop new antibiotics for big pharma

- Biodiversity Convention

- Organization of decentralized bioprospecting

- Peer review of results

- Knowledge transfer on micro-biology

- Cooperation between open science community, industry and government

- Bridging the gap between compound discovery and drug development, from organizational, legal and financial perspective


In our Open Wetlab we are organizing the following:

- during the summer we will have a full week workshop on BioStrike

- we are planning a BioStrike conference, inviting parties from all sides"